@mountainbike I agree! Although I have 2 cars which consume hardly any oil between changes, I still do not ever have to add any. I gave away a gallon of top up oil because it was just sitting there.
Environmental zealots usually lack a sense of proportion. If the burning of a quart of oil every 5000 miles is considered environmentally bad, we should put a prohibitive tax on large engines that create a lot of greenhouse gasses.
A good example of environmental insanity: We lived in Malaysia and just across the Strait of Malacca in Indonesia, a large producer of palm oil for diesel use in Europe. The European union had legislated a certain % of “renewable” fuel in diesel, which is mostly met by palm diesel. As a result, Indonesian operators with the tacit agreement of their government burn thousands of acres of prime jungle (they don’t even harvest the wood!), creating a really bad smoke situation and putting millions of tons of CARBON into the atmosphere. The palm trees planted yield fruit in about 10 years, then the oil is shipped to Europe. Even in the long or short term, this activity has no net contribution to mitigate climate change.
Compared to 30 years ago cars are more kind to the environment, but building ever larger vehicles partly negates the improvement. This is called the Efficiency Paradox
With respect to the poster’s comments, the SAE has done several life cycle environmental calculations and by far the most benign impact is building a good car, maintaining it well till the end of its DESIGN LIFE and then recycling it. Today’s design life is at least 250,000 miles for most cars. Poster would do well to download some of these papers.