Andy please qualify your wind turbines and birds thing – in its current form it's liable to leave people to easily dismissing the impact of wind turbines on birds. My academic background is in ecology and your chart seriously oversimplifies the situation.
The core problem is you're treating birds as a fungible population, almost as if all birds are part of one big species, so all we need to know is what kills the most overall and focus on that.
But of course, birds aren't all one big species. Wind turbines aren't a big killer of birds overall, but they can cause enormous losses to populations of particular species.
By the same logic, poaching is not a significant killer of all wild animals, but it's one of the biggest for rhinoceroses.
Here's one example of turbines be responsible for **half** the deaths recorded in a local population of eagles (WRA here is just "Wind Resource Area):
Of 61 recorded deaths of radio-tagged eagles during the four-year investigation, 33 (54%) resulted
from electrical generation or transmission. Of these, 23 (38%) were caused by wind turbine blade
strikes, and 10 (16%) by electrocutions on distribution lines, all outside the WRA. Additional
fatalities went unrecorded because turbine blade strikes destroyed the transmitter in an estimated
30% of cases. The aerial surveys showed that breeding eagles rarely entered the WRA, whereas non-
territorial eagles tended to move about freely throughout the study area, often visiting the WRA.
It's not just deaths, either. You can harm birds with slower life history strategies (eg birds of prey that have few young and take longer to mature) with turbines. See here this example with white-tailed eagles:
Of course the next move in the argument is, well of course, wind turbines are net positive for the environment, suck it up, shut up and multiply etc etc.
But this would again oversimplify. First, large birds of prey are frequently keystone species. One lost sparrow is very different to one lost raptor. The impacts of raptor deaths on populations of their prey can be huge and greatly influence foodwebs beneath them. It's not just hopeless sentimentality by clueless hippies; a distorted ecosystem is now a significant consequence for wind turbine construction and one that, even if overridden, needs to be given due weight.
It's not necessarily either wind turbines OR birds, see this study on the impact of partial stoppages. Not all turbines at all times are equally lethal. There can be ways to mitigate the effect, see this study:
I'm not anti-wind turbine; I've paid my own money to go and see them out at sea, I think they're beautiful things. And there are example where they can help create reefs and encourage biodiversity, as well. There are no solutions, only trade-offs, and all that. I get it.
But we need to give the sometimes catastrophic problems they do cause some species due weight. It's about way more than just raw bird numbers.
Commenting a month late, but o like the idea you are making this an interactive document based on comment input. Nobody can know it all and comments often provide further information, one reason I like to read them. Of course people arent going to keep returning to this post week after week so there's a question of timing there.
Regarding education I think there's really good commentary on this topic from Natalie Wexler here on SS, about phonics, about why the gains from phonics instruction, though vital, cease around 8th grade, about why a student must have a core amount of information about a topic to comprehend further reading (too much unfamiliar info and they haven't got sufficient info to make inferences about the parts of a passage they don't understand), about the Mississippi Miracle, etc. I am not in the field at all but I like reading about the topic and of course it's crucial that the citizens of tomorrow are well educated. Though I think we are failing due to our undisciplined culture abs other reasons that aren't teacher's fault.
> ut of course, birds aren't all one big species. Wind turbines aren't a big killer of birds overall, but they can cause enormous losses to populations of particular species.
But why would we care about that? Biodiversity has no value at all in itself- we could eliminate 99% of all species on the planet and that would actually be a positive thing. To the extent that birds dying is bad, it's because of the bird itself suffering (the species doesn't really matter), the birds being valuable to people in some way (unlikely, if the species is already sufficiently endangered to make it a matter of concern), or because of secondary effects on the rest of the ecosystem (see prev remark).
Neither does water or oxygen. This isn't an interesting or insightful perspective.
Moving on. Ecosystem services – pollination, pest control, disease suppression, nutrient cycling – have been valued at $125 trillion/year globally (Costanza et al. 2014, updated from the famous 1997 Nature paper).
This isn't some abstract exercise; these are services the global economy depends on and largely gets for *free*. If you think you've found an error, don't comment here, chat to Nature and get them to retract the paper.
Anyway. What about birds specifically? A 2022 global meta-analysis (Díaz-Siefer et al., Journal of Pest Science, 179 case studies) found wild birds significantly reduce crop damage and increase yield. Great tits in European orchards cut pest damage by 50% (Mols & Visser 2007, PLoS ONE). Globally, insectivorous birds consume an estimated 400–500 million tonnes of arthropods per year (Nyffeler et al. 2018, The Science of Nature), a significant chunk of which are agricultural pests.
"We could eliminate 99% of all species and that would actually be a positive thing"
We actually have a natural experiment for what happens when you lose *just one species of large carnivorous bird*.
India's vultures crashed 99%+ after a livestock painkiller (diclofenac) entered widespread use. Frank & Sudarshan 2024 (published in the American Economic Review, notably – an economics journal, *not* an ecology one) found this caused ~100,000 additional human deaths per year and $69.4 billion/year in damages.
Feral dogs replaced vultures as scavengers, rabies exploded, carcasses ended up *rotting in waterways*.
So. One species gone, half a million people dead.
You may understand why I don't think your 99% of species argument works. If you've got a better model that says we can cause extinction of 99% of species with no bad effects, cite it – I'm serious, *cite the evidence that backs up your claim*.
The core problem with your argument is it assumes we know which species are load-bearing and which aren't. We mostly don't. The insurance hypothesis (Yachi & Loreau 1999, PNAS) exists precisely because biodiversity buffers ecosystems against shocks we can't predict.
(Even on this specific case: please cite your methodology for knowing that the birds most commonly killed by wind turbines aren't load bearing. You have a major, publishable breakthrough in my field if you do.)
On the plane one, I think there’s a real fact in the vicinity, which is that the existence of flights makes a lot of people travel much further distances than they would with just driving.
Most of the time, this is because there is a real and significant benefit gained by the longer trip that you couldn’t have with a shorter one, so the tradeoff is reasonable. But there might be a case to be made that if a New Yorker is considering a summer beach weekend in Florida or in Atlantic City, they probably should give more consideration to Atlantic City based on the climate argument.
You should remove the housing section entirely. Its inclusion causes me to wonder if Knoll’s law applies to all the other sections that I’m not as informed about. Your chart only applies to new homes and ends 10 years ago.
The fact that new homes were getting larger in 1985 has little relevance to the current crisis. The stock of homes has been growing very slowly since 2008. Rents are eating up all real income growth of families with the lowest incomes. Tent encampments are taking over urban parks in cities where they had never been until recently. The evidence is easy to see that there is a crisis.
Just pick a random class C apartment in LA or Phoenix or Atlanta. Track the rent on those apartments for the past 20 years, or as far back as you can track them. Have those rents gone up because those apartments are being renovated every year? Where the crisis is most noticeable is the rent on low tier aging housing in the last couple of decades, which is precisely what your chart excludes.
I can promise you that Scott Sumner would agree that there is a housing crisis because I have co-written articles with him about it.
I agree that schools are overall extremely safe places, but I’d hypothesize the mass shooter phenomenon has increased the odds of being killed in wealthier schools. I suspect the previous “less sensational” forms of violence were concentrated geographically in the same way that violence more broadly is, whereas highly publicized mass shooter events are more geographically distributed (indeed the break from the traditional violence patterns part of why they are highly publicized).
I was sceptical that micro-plastics might not be the disaster they're cracked up to be, but I made the mistake of saying that to my son who works in the area. at the Florey Institute.
That's because having a study with robust enough controls would be close to impossible. But standard logic would dictate ingesting a lot of microplastics into your body over a lifetime isn't good.
The chart about millennial wealth is actually deeply misleading. It's a chart of Household Wealth but a major result of various trends (such as housing unaffordability) is reduced household formation. So that data is conditioning on a collider.
I looked into this a while back and found that many many things are cheaper now adjusted for inflation, including gas, food, books, energy, rent etc. but that the main things that have gotten much more expensive over time adjusted for inflation (% of median wage) are basically all “American Dream” things: higher education, buying a home, healthcare, and childcare.
A couple small nitpicks about the housing section:
- I would've thought that most complaints about affordability are actually about the lack of supply, either overall in the costliest cities or specifically of smaller homes that hardly get built. It seems to me that your caveats at the beginning are actually the main substance of the argument.
- Some of the things you list in the examples of greater quality are either negligible in cost (smart thermostats), older than suggested (copper piping) or actually cost-saving vs older tech (PEX piping).
Overall I think you make a good point about increased quality, but I think the "ifs" you start with constrain the argument you refute to one not many people are making.
My impression is that the myth about teacher pay is mostly about early-career teachers. IIRC, pay mostly scales with experience so a teacher who has been around for 20, 30, 40 years is making a good amount, but starting salaries are low so not motivating to enter the field.
I agree, I think this is a relevant point. I would be interested in a comparison of entry level teacher pay to other jobs with the same education level. I have heard more than one person I am acquainted with say that they went into teaching and then quit because the pay was too low.
For example, a quick google search is showing me that the average entry-level pay for a teacher in my state is around $45,000. That seems pretty low to me considering the difficulty and overall societal importance of the job.
I think that if testosterone levels were falling, that would be a good thing on the whole. Hormone-laden young men are not a source of great good in the world. I say this as a former one. Also:
I'm kind of testosterone-agnostic. I think both T and E are incredibly complicated and too bound up with how we relate to gender to make big claims about them one way or another.
Re: your friend who is worried about wind turbines killing eagles and other raptors. That problem has already likely been solved. It turns out that painting one othe 3 blades black makes the danger zone visible to these birds:
You realize most people do not live in new houses, right? So saying there is no housing crisis because cost per square foot of new houses is the same is just nonsensical.
Houses are getting bigger because new houses are overwhelmingly getting built for the rich. Houses in the 50s were small because they were built for middle-class people. The shrinking middle class is now confined to these small, older houses, they do not build new houses.
This also leaves out the cost of land, the single biggest cost in expensive areas.
Aside from the evidence that seed oils are bad is itself shockingly bad, we actually have really high quality evidence they're good - at least relative to the things they're replacing, i.e. beef tallow and butter.
I was really surprised by the comparison of travel by car, bus and plane.
I'd have expected buses to be much more efficient compared to cars than factor ~2. Does this really mean cars with more than 2 passengers produce less co2 per person compared to buses on the same route?
This also puts the plane-car comparison into another perspective imo, as that only holds up for individual travel by car - taking the plane with your whole family would be a lot worse than taking the car.
No, this doesn’t generally mean that cars with more than 2 passengers produce less CO2 per person compared to buses on the same route. First, this is data per passenger km, and cars have around 1.5 passengers on average. Considering that, the figures for cars actually seem a little on the high side for the UK, but for the US, ~250 g per km for an average car definitely checks out, to be (roughly) divided by the number of passengers to arrive at a passenger km figure. Second, the data for buses seem to be for local buses. Intercity coaches are a lot more efficient, because they tend to be more fully occupied and do less stop-and-go in city traffic. So if we compare intercity trips, a coach should definitely be better than even a fully occupied car.
Thanks, I did not consider that the data might be based on cars with an average number of passengers instead of individual.
Regarding buses however, I did notice that this is about local buses, and I'm still surprised that the average local bus isn't more "energy efficient". It makes sense if you assume local buses not to carry many passengers most of the time, nevertheless I find it very interesting to see these numbers.
Your comment exemplifies what, to me, the internet can be at its best. You expressed a genuine opinion with clear examples that are potentially falsifiable. No snark. Just openness and facts. Thank you for this breath of fresh air this morning, a week after you posted.
Andy please qualify your wind turbines and birds thing – in its current form it's liable to leave people to easily dismissing the impact of wind turbines on birds. My academic background is in ecology and your chart seriously oversimplifies the situation.
The core problem is you're treating birds as a fungible population, almost as if all birds are part of one big species, so all we need to know is what kills the most overall and focus on that.
But of course, birds aren't all one big species. Wind turbines aren't a big killer of birds overall, but they can cause enormous losses to populations of particular species.
By the same logic, poaching is not a significant killer of all wild animals, but it's one of the biggest for rhinoceroses.
Here's one example of turbines be responsible for **half** the deaths recorded in a local population of eagles (WRA here is just "Wind Resource Area):
Of 61 recorded deaths of radio-tagged eagles during the four-year investigation, 33 (54%) resulted
from electrical generation or transmission. Of these, 23 (38%) were caused by wind turbine blade
strikes, and 10 (16%) by electrocutions on distribution lines, all outside the WRA. Additional
fatalities went unrecorded because turbine blade strikes destroyed the transmitter in an estimated
30% of cases. The aerial surveys showed that breeding eagles rarely entered the WRA, whereas non-
territorial eagles tended to move about freely throughout the study area, often visiting the WRA.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/26092.pdf
It's not just deaths, either. You can harm birds with slower life history strategies (eg birds of prey that have few young and take longer to mature) with turbines. See here this example with white-tailed eagles:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320711003818
Of course the next move in the argument is, well of course, wind turbines are net positive for the environment, suck it up, shut up and multiply etc etc.
But this would again oversimplify. First, large birds of prey are frequently keystone species. One lost sparrow is very different to one lost raptor. The impacts of raptor deaths on populations of their prey can be huge and greatly influence foodwebs beneath them. It's not just hopeless sentimentality by clueless hippies; a distorted ecosystem is now a significant consequence for wind turbine construction and one that, even if overridden, needs to be given due weight.
It's not necessarily either wind turbines OR birds, see this study on the impact of partial stoppages. Not all turbines at all times are equally lethal. There can be ways to mitigate the effect, see this study:
https://docs.wind-watch.org/deLucas-2012-vultures-spain.pdf
I'm not anti-wind turbine; I've paid my own money to go and see them out at sea, I think they're beautiful things. And there are example where they can help create reefs and encourage biodiversity, as well. There are no solutions, only trade-offs, and all that. I get it.
But we need to give the sometimes catastrophic problems they do cause some species due weight. It's about way more than just raw bird numbers.
Great points, really appreciate it. A little busy right now but will circle back to this over the next few days
Gonna cross it out and link to your comment
I've been on the internet a fair while now, and this sort of willingness to change your mind in this way is rare indeed. Thanks Andy!
Commenting a month late, but o like the idea you are making this an interactive document based on comment input. Nobody can know it all and comments often provide further information, one reason I like to read them. Of course people arent going to keep returning to this post week after week so there's a question of timing there.
Regarding education I think there's really good commentary on this topic from Natalie Wexler here on SS, about phonics, about why the gains from phonics instruction, though vital, cease around 8th grade, about why a student must have a core amount of information about a topic to comprehend further reading (too much unfamiliar info and they haven't got sufficient info to make inferences about the parts of a passage they don't understand), about the Mississippi Miracle, etc. I am not in the field at all but I like reading about the topic and of course it's crucial that the citizens of tomorrow are well educated. Though I think we are failing due to our undisciplined culture abs other reasons that aren't teacher's fault.
What a thoughtful reply. Thank you.
> ut of course, birds aren't all one big species. Wind turbines aren't a big killer of birds overall, but they can cause enormous losses to populations of particular species.
But why would we care about that? Biodiversity has no value at all in itself- we could eliminate 99% of all species on the planet and that would actually be a positive thing. To the extent that birds dying is bad, it's because of the bird itself suffering (the species doesn't really matter), the birds being valuable to people in some way (unlikely, if the species is already sufficiently endangered to make it a matter of concern), or because of secondary effects on the rest of the ecosystem (see prev remark).
"Biodiversity has no value in itself"
Neither does water or oxygen. This isn't an interesting or insightful perspective.
Moving on. Ecosystem services – pollination, pest control, disease suppression, nutrient cycling – have been valued at $125 trillion/year globally (Costanza et al. 2014, updated from the famous 1997 Nature paper).
This isn't some abstract exercise; these are services the global economy depends on and largely gets for *free*. If you think you've found an error, don't comment here, chat to Nature and get them to retract the paper.
Anyway. What about birds specifically? A 2022 global meta-analysis (Díaz-Siefer et al., Journal of Pest Science, 179 case studies) found wild birds significantly reduce crop damage and increase yield. Great tits in European orchards cut pest damage by 50% (Mols & Visser 2007, PLoS ONE). Globally, insectivorous birds consume an estimated 400–500 million tonnes of arthropods per year (Nyffeler et al. 2018, The Science of Nature), a significant chunk of which are agricultural pests.
"We could eliminate 99% of all species and that would actually be a positive thing"
We actually have a natural experiment for what happens when you lose *just one species of large carnivorous bird*.
India's vultures crashed 99%+ after a livestock painkiller (diclofenac) entered widespread use. Frank & Sudarshan 2024 (published in the American Economic Review, notably – an economics journal, *not* an ecology one) found this caused ~100,000 additional human deaths per year and $69.4 billion/year in damages.
Feral dogs replaced vultures as scavengers, rabies exploded, carcasses ended up *rotting in waterways*.
So. One species gone, half a million people dead.
You may understand why I don't think your 99% of species argument works. If you've got a better model that says we can cause extinction of 99% of species with no bad effects, cite it – I'm serious, *cite the evidence that backs up your claim*.
The core problem with your argument is it assumes we know which species are load-bearing and which aren't. We mostly don't. The insurance hypothesis (Yachi & Loreau 1999, PNAS) exists precisely because biodiversity buffers ecosystems against shocks we can't predict.
(Even on this specific case: please cite your methodology for knowing that the birds most commonly killed by wind turbines aren't load bearing. You have a major, publishable breakthrough in my field if you do.)
Belated non-subscriber comment, but also, bats!
Some more proposals:
-GMOs
-Nuclear fission
-Wind farms killing migratory birds
-Solar farms taking up all of the good farmland
On the plane one, I think there’s a real fact in the vicinity, which is that the existence of flights makes a lot of people travel much further distances than they would with just driving.
Most of the time, this is because there is a real and significant benefit gained by the longer trip that you couldn’t have with a shorter one, so the tradeoff is reasonable. But there might be a case to be made that if a New Yorker is considering a summer beach weekend in Florida or in Atlantic City, they probably should give more consideration to Atlantic City based on the climate argument.
But this isn’t most flights.
You should remove the housing section entirely. Its inclusion causes me to wonder if Knoll’s law applies to all the other sections that I’m not as informed about. Your chart only applies to new homes and ends 10 years ago.
The fact that new homes were getting larger in 1985 has little relevance to the current crisis. The stock of homes has been growing very slowly since 2008. Rents are eating up all real income growth of families with the lowest incomes. Tent encampments are taking over urban parks in cities where they had never been until recently. The evidence is easy to see that there is a crisis.
Just pick a random class C apartment in LA or Phoenix or Atlanta. Track the rent on those apartments for the past 20 years, or as far back as you can track them. Have those rents gone up because those apartments are being renovated every year? Where the crisis is most noticeable is the rent on low tier aging housing in the last couple of decades, which is precisely what your chart excludes.
I can promise you that Scott Sumner would agree that there is a housing crisis because I have co-written articles with him about it.
Thank you! Will do, appreciate the pushback. Was on the edge about it already
I agree that schools are overall extremely safe places, but I’d hypothesize the mass shooter phenomenon has increased the odds of being killed in wealthier schools. I suspect the previous “less sensational” forms of violence were concentrated geographically in the same way that violence more broadly is, whereas highly publicized mass shooter events are more geographically distributed (indeed the break from the traditional violence patterns part of why they are highly publicized).
And let’s not forget the new scare over microplastics.
How is that not real?
Microplastics certainly exist and are widespread, but thus far we have no high-quality evidence linking them to specific harms in the human body.
I was sceptical that micro-plastics might not be the disaster they're cracked up to be, but I made the mistake of saying that to my son who works in the area. at the Florey Institute.
https://florey.edu.au/news/2024/08/florey-research-finds-association-between-prenatal-exposure-to-plastics-and-autism-in-boys/
That's because having a study with robust enough controls would be close to impossible. But standard logic would dictate ingesting a lot of microplastics into your body over a lifetime isn't good.
Only if you can demonstrate a set of mechanisms by which they cause harm. If you do that, they can be tested in the lab. And they have not been.
The chart about millennial wealth is actually deeply misleading. It's a chart of Household Wealth but a major result of various trends (such as housing unaffordability) is reduced household formation. So that data is conditioning on a collider.
Oh interesting, will circle back here
It's not quite as bad as some similar charts (share of households that own a home is much worse) but it's a real problem for time series days.
Crossed it out and linked to your comment
I looked into this a while back and found that many many things are cheaper now adjusted for inflation, including gas, food, books, energy, rent etc. but that the main things that have gotten much more expensive over time adjusted for inflation (% of median wage) are basically all “American Dream” things: higher education, buying a home, healthcare, and childcare.
A couple small nitpicks about the housing section:
- I would've thought that most complaints about affordability are actually about the lack of supply, either overall in the costliest cities or specifically of smaller homes that hardly get built. It seems to me that your caveats at the beginning are actually the main substance of the argument.
- Some of the things you list in the examples of greater quality are either negligible in cost (smart thermostats), older than suggested (copper piping) or actually cost-saving vs older tech (PEX piping).
Overall I think you make a good point about increased quality, but I think the "ifs" you start with constrain the argument you refute to one not many people are making.
My impression is that the myth about teacher pay is mostly about early-career teachers. IIRC, pay mostly scales with experience so a teacher who has been around for 20, 30, 40 years is making a good amount, but starting salaries are low so not motivating to enter the field.
Does that align with your experience?
I agree, I think this is a relevant point. I would be interested in a comparison of entry level teacher pay to other jobs with the same education level. I have heard more than one person I am acquainted with say that they went into teaching and then quit because the pay was too low.
For example, a quick google search is showing me that the average entry-level pay for a teacher in my state is around $45,000. That seems pretty low to me considering the difficulty and overall societal importance of the job.
I think that if testosterone levels were falling, that would be a good thing on the whole. Hormone-laden young men are not a source of great good in the world. I say this as a former one. Also:
https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Testosterone-Essays-Biology-Predicament/dp/0684838915
I'm kind of testosterone-agnostic. I think both T and E are incredibly complicated and too bound up with how we relate to gender to make big claims about them one way or another.
Yeah, I could be wrong, "on the whole." In addition to Sapolsky's book, this was interesting as well: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/220/testosterone
One of my favorite podcast episodes, really wild throughout
Hi Andy,
Re: your friend who is worried about wind turbines killing eagles and other raptors. That problem has already likely been solved. It turns out that painting one othe 3 blades black makes the danger zone visible to these birds:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-wind-turbine-blades-help-birds-avoid-deadly-collisions-180975668/
And it's under further study here:
https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/scientists-studying-impact-painting-wind-turbine-blade-black-reduce-bird-collisions
Please share
I hope you complement this with a list of catastrophes that actually are catastrophes!
You realize most people do not live in new houses, right? So saying there is no housing crisis because cost per square foot of new houses is the same is just nonsensical.
Houses are getting bigger because new houses are overwhelmingly getting built for the rich. Houses in the 50s were small because they were built for middle-class people. The shrinking middle class is now confined to these small, older houses, they do not build new houses.
This also leaves out the cost of land, the single biggest cost in expensive areas.
Yup deleted the housing point, got a lot of good pushback on it
Aside from the evidence that seed oils are bad is itself shockingly bad, we actually have really high quality evidence they're good - at least relative to the things they're replacing, i.e. beef tallow and butter.
What high quality evidence is there? Just curious
Kessler syndrome (specifically due to starlink) is both basically impossible to occur in the foreseeable future, and also would naturally end due to drag leading to junk deorbiting itself (https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/understanding-the-misunderstood-kessler-syndrome/)
The individual & media disproportionate response to terrorism when it is incredibly statistically rare in US&Europe is a big bugbear of many libertarians including Bruce Schneier (e.g. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/terrorist_attac.html)
I was really surprised by the comparison of travel by car, bus and plane.
I'd have expected buses to be much more efficient compared to cars than factor ~2. Does this really mean cars with more than 2 passengers produce less co2 per person compared to buses on the same route?
This also puts the plane-car comparison into another perspective imo, as that only holds up for individual travel by car - taking the plane with your whole family would be a lot worse than taking the car.
No, this doesn’t generally mean that cars with more than 2 passengers produce less CO2 per person compared to buses on the same route. First, this is data per passenger km, and cars have around 1.5 passengers on average. Considering that, the figures for cars actually seem a little on the high side for the UK, but for the US, ~250 g per km for an average car definitely checks out, to be (roughly) divided by the number of passengers to arrive at a passenger km figure. Second, the data for buses seem to be for local buses. Intercity coaches are a lot more efficient, because they tend to be more fully occupied and do less stop-and-go in city traffic. So if we compare intercity trips, a coach should definitely be better than even a fully occupied car.
Thanks, I did not consider that the data might be based on cars with an average number of passengers instead of individual.
Regarding buses however, I did notice that this is about local buses, and I'm still surprised that the average local bus isn't more "energy efficient". It makes sense if you assume local buses not to carry many passengers most of the time, nevertheless I find it very interesting to see these numbers.
Your comment exemplifies what, to me, the internet can be at its best. You expressed a genuine opinion with clear examples that are potentially falsifiable. No snark. Just openness and facts. Thank you for this breath of fresh air this morning, a week after you posted.