I went down a bit of a rabbit hole recently and ended up thinking about something uncomfortable.
A regular 8–10 km auto or cab ride can emit roughly ~1 kg of CO₂. On its own, that feels negligible. But when you scale that across thousands or millions of daily rides in a city… it adds up fast.
What struck me wasn’t the number itself, but the disconnect.
Most of us know pollution is bad. We complain about AQI, traffic, heat, all of it. But at the same time, we’re part of the system contributing to it (myself included). And yet, we don’t really change anything.
I don’t think it’s a lack of awareness anymore. It feels more like:
- It’s slightly inconvenient to act
- The impact of one person feels too small
- There’s no immediate feedback loop
So it just becomes one of those things we acknowledge and move on from.
Lately I’ve been wondering:
If acting on it was extremely easy (like 20–30 seconds after a ride), would people actually do it?
Or is this one of those “sounds good in theory, but no one really follows through” situations?
Curious how others think about this.
Do you ever consider the emissions from your daily transport, or is it just not something worth worrying about at an individual level?