Cars and Carbon Payback

I appreciate that terms like "Machiavellian asshole" get bandied around people who write articles about topics like this but I'm going to run with it anyway.

Some days ago I was discussing F1 cars - specifically, whether they're an environmental help or a menace. I've had this discussion with a couple of people recently so I can only conclude Jeremy Clarkson said something about it once and that particular episode of Top Gear has recently been on the repeats.

The gist of the argument is that F1 technology trickles down to regular automobiles, thus leading to massive fuel efficiency gains and more than offsetting the emissions from a few F1 cars spinning around the track for countless hours. I haven't seen numbers, but it intuitively makes sense.

So, I got to wondering whether there might be some kind of environmental economics that does a similar job with helping to justify car ownership. Specifically - to what extent does the road toll offset car emissions? Please note, I'm not condoning this as a suitable tool for public decision making - though I am broadly in favour of things that promote loosening up some of our draconian road loaws.

The annual road toll in Australia in 2008 was 1,464, comprising 1,075 males and 388 females with an average age of 40 years (1). Given that the average life expectancy for males is 79 and females is 84, the weighted average life expectancy for this group was 80 years. Being a part of the 2008 road toll effectively wiped off an average 40 years of life per person.

On the carbon front, the average Australian emits 28.1 tonnes of CO2 per year (2), so cutting out 40 years for 1,464 people translates to saving of around 1.7 million tCO2 for that year.

Meanwhile, there were 15.7 million cars on Australian roads at last count (3), emitting an average of 4.3 tCO2 per year (4) for a total of 67.5 million tCO2.

Conclusion: each year, Mother Earth claws back around 2.5% of the CO2 emissions that cars put out in this country. This would suggest that our road toll would need to increase by a factor of 40 before cars started to pay for themselves on the carbon emissions balance sheet.

(1) http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/publications/2009/pdf/rsr_04.pdf
(2) http://www.garnautreview.org.au/chp7.htm
(3) http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/9309.0/
(4) http://www.bendigobank.com.au/generationgreen/carbon_offsets/index.asp
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate