All of this is really a case of smoke & mirrors, particularly the statistics.
The " houshold" figures exclude pubic transport , busses, trucks, trains & jet aircraft.
It includes cars mowers electricity & gas including that used to generate electricity.
Now 5% of that is a very long bow.
They tried the same BS down here and thankfully got shot down in flames when asked about the exclusions from the measurements.
They even tried to make things worse by using "week end " emissions when a lot of cars are at home all day and the mower & trimmers are out being used.
Even at 1% it sound really good, till you take into account what they excluded.
A 747 jet taking off uses about 2 gallons of fuel a second for about 5 to 10 minutes till it gets to cruise level.
At take off the engines are about 90% efficient ( at best ) so that means of the 1,200 gallons of jet 1 pouring into the engines about 120 gallons go in one end and come out the other unless they are using after burners which they can not use if they want the houses below to keep their tiles on the roof.
Now there are around 70,000 jet flights / day in the USA so roughly 8,000,000 gallons of unburned fuel each and every day from jet travel that works out at 56,000,000 gallons of unburned fuel a week.
Now there are about 118,000,000 houses in the USA, so to be emitting the same amount of unburned fuel as avaition alone each house would have to pour out a tad less than 1/2 gallon of two stroke fuel into a bowl and let it evaporate.
Now very few of those house holds would use anything like 1/2 gallon of 2 stroke a week, let alone having a 1/2 gallon pass through the hand held device unburned.
And I have not bothered to add busses , trucks, shipping or industry to the calculations so even if you use the BS 5% figure, it is 5% of 0.01% total emissions or in laymans terms SFA.
Now making things burn cleaner is in itself a good idea, I don't particularly like paying for fuel that gets blown out the exhaust or burned in a after burner ( catalytic converter to hide it's true function ) that does not produce any power for my equipment. But don't fool yourself into believing it will make any measurable difference to any pollution apart from noise.
Then on top of that there is the inbuilt pollution that gets generated i making the equipment that will not last as long thus require more frequent replacement and the logistic pollution in getting it from where it was made to your door.
So you see it is really a fools errand to make it look like a lot of overpaid but well meaning beurocrats are actually earning their keep ( which they are not )
