The tradeoff

My coworker and I are working on a project where we have to calculate the amount of natural gas that is discharged to the atmosphere whenever a compressor station (or part of it) has to be blown down, which has led us to some interesting findings.  A blow down occurs when work needs to be done on part of a station and the pipeline and/or equipment needs to be purged of it's natural gas.  The gas can't feasibly be collected and used as the profit to expense ratio won't justify it.  As a result the gas will be released to the atmosphere.  This raised some interesting questions.  Most importantly how relevant is the quantity of gas that is released.  Without getting into the specific numbers what we found out is that the quantity of gas released is 3300 times less than the daily methane production of the world's termite population.  It is also far far less than the global cow population's methane emission.  What we need to calculate is how many cows or termites equate to the amount of methane a blow down emits.  

This led to a conversation between my coworker and I about the effectiveness of hybrid cars.  We found out that 16 supertankers (the huge quarter mile long ships with a capacity of 14,000 containers) emit enough sulphur as the entire global car population.  Now I know there are likely questions about whether the time frame of this, but I don't know if that matters.  A lot can be gleaned from this statistic.  The most obvious things that I take are that if we want to save the world it won't be through the purchase of a hybrid car, but rather through the consumption of local products.  Naturally there are things (most obviously electronics), which are difficult to source locally.  However, there are the obvious things that are consumed in higher quantities (clothing, cosmetics, paper products, etc.) that are relatively easy to source locally.  What is the point in getting a hybrid if everything you purchase is made in China?  At that point you are probably doing more harm than good, but you feel good about it driving around in your hybrid.  Another side to the hybrid story is that the amount of toxic materials that go into producing the batteries negates the benefit of better gas mileage.  That's where the question of the tradeoff comes into play.  Is it better to produce gas or produce toxic batteries?  It's not a simple answer.  Certainly not buying hybrids won't change much, because the cadmium and lithium used in their batteries is used in computers, cellphones, tablets, TVs, and video game systems all of which are incredibly disposable.  Even recycling is increasingly questionable when our recycled paper is shipped to China (on one of the supertankers) to make new paper products.  Still I stand by the idea that recycling electronics and buying locally (as much as possible) are the best places to start.