“But tires”
Ban all vehicles over 5000lbs to start without a specialized license and extremely heavy fees to have them. EVs are dropping in weight daily, ICE vehicles have been increasing in weight to dodge policies. One is a means to an end, the other is a means to profit.
Profit for few vs humanity’s existance… which should we choose?
I like to think most people, at least where I live, know cars burn up the planet. Problem is most can’t afford a $50k AUD EV, even on finance, but a 2011 Hyundai shit box or a 2005 Toyota hilux is less than $10k.
Oh also, cars are being made to be replaced within a few years. Cost and build quality of modern vehicles pushes me away from buying an EV. Hopefully in the future, they become more ubiquitous, cheaper, and we can solve the problem of handling old batteries and stability.
Buy a 2016 shitbox eGulf or a Volt instead. No more gas bills.
There batteries are rated to make something like 480,000 miles before getting to 80% battery life.
The costs are high right now but the median ice car is over 32,000. You aren’t buying any car new for under 10 grand.
Because those have nothing to do with each other. You can also drown in your bathtub. That doesn’t mean water falling from the sky is an instant drowning. Quantity, method of exposure and context matter a lot when gauging how dangerous something can be.
ICE exhaust is poisonous, it’s significantly less poisonous when diluted by a large chunk of atmosphere. How much so isn’t a simple question, and it becomes much harder for the average person when it’s health effects are delayed for years to decades and those effects often have comorbidities with other risky behavior.
This is exactly why education is important, these things aren’t actually that apparent after we cleaned up some of the more obvious consequences from the start of the industrial revolution.
A lot of it has to do with propaganda, both the oil and car industry have successfully convinced people that they need petroleum and a car
My city’s sporadic adoption of partial suddenly-ending bike lanes that top out at like 3 feet wide, and urban sprawl that puts any necessities at 4+ miles away, have convinced me I need a car. :(
I think the oil and car industries convinced city planning and zoning officials that the happiest city is one with heavy idling truck traffic jams and winding suburban labyrinths on the fringes.
My life has convinced me I need a car. I don’t necessarily need petroleum - I’m willing to shop electric but the price needs to be good too.
I have represented consumers in cases related to lung cancers, and in defending those claims, the insurance carriers always ask my clients in detail about how much time they’ve spent around cars.
They get really interested if you were a gas station attendant, or a valet, or especially worked at an auto garage, in which case they want to know about the size of the doors, if they were kept open or closed during work, if the garage had any kind of ventilation system, whether cieling fans or the pipes that go over an exhaust pipe.
Almost like they know something about hydrocarbon fumes that the rest of us don’t…
Insurance people are just trying to deny the claim that’s the only reason they have more interest in focusing on the job specifics. They can then use big scary words in court should it come to that.
When you’re outside all the gases coming out of your car’s tailpipe go up into the sky where they turn into stars.
Duh.
That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it.
You’re being sarcastic but for the average person it’s simply: “Garage small, atmosphere big”.
They look down their street and can see a dozen cars in their field of view and then they see the all-encompassing sky with an endless amount of fresh air available. Conclusion: not a problem.
30 people die a day just in Australia from traffic pollution.
I think it’s safe to say people literally don’t give a fcuk.
It’s very simple, really. Have you ever witnessed someone drop dead on the street from traffic pollution? No? Well then nobody cares because it’s not immediately visible.
What they think is no mystery - they think the atmosphere and ecosystem are vast enough to absorb it. As “proof” they’ll point out things like smog in Victorian London being much worse than modern Los Angeles. They can’t produce any numbers or science but they find these mental images convincing enough.
The sky is fucking gigantic and the thought that we could ever have a big enough impact, even collectively, to make the slightest shift in something so massive feels dead wrong, even when you know it’s right.
Both are primarily a means for profit, as most tasks accomplished with a car are more reasonably done a different way. The efficiency of road based motorised transport is so abysmal that it almost doesn’t make sense.
The only reason we rely on it currently to such an extend is because our entire economy is highly irrational, except if seen from a supremely privileged point of view.
There’s this thing called “Alert Distance”, it’s the distance at which animals perceive and begin to react to a threat.
I’ll use it as an analogue for humans’ perceptions of threat.
Say a squirrel knows a cat is a threat, and may react to it when the cat is 15 feet away, whether that reaction is turning to face the threat, making a warning call, or running away.
Now put 50 cats hiding in the bushes and surrounding area around the squirrel. Can’t see ‘em, so it isn’t a problem, even though the squirrel knows cats are a bad thing. The alert distance hasn’t been triggered. The squirrels in the surrounding neighborhood are disappearing, eaten by cats, but our squirrel isn’t thinking too hard about this. More acorns for me!
Put a car in the garage and you can smell the exhaust. Your eyes probably water from the fumes. You know this is potentially lethal, so you do something about it. Shut off the car, leave the garage, open the garage door, whatever. Your alert distance has been triggered. The threat is right in front of you.
Now, as you say, drive that car outside with millions of other vehicles and systems consuming fossil fuels. No real smell or issues for most of us. The alert is only being triggered by what we read (if we bother to read anything that accurately portrays the threat) and maybe a rare bad storm or cluster of hot days that won’t negatively affect the vast majority of people. Negatively = inconvenience.
I don’t know if squirrels lie to themselves about how close a cat threat might be, but humans excel at lying to each other and to themselves for a crapload of reasons. So the fact is that the threat is invisible to many, ignored by most, and actively and willfully obfuscated by a shitload more. So the figurative alert distance doesn’t even exist at all for the vast majority of humans. It’s not going to kill you now, next week, or even next year.
Even when the world has crumbled, plenty will still lie about what’s to blame.
Because the human brain doesn’t intuitively count the way we’re taught in school.
Our brains are very good at understanding 1, 2, sometimes 3 and, “many”. That’s the data we get from smart chips, young children and isolated pre-literate societies.
Counting bigger numbers requires abstract systems. Our brains can do that but it’s much harder and we don’t grasp it as well.
The practical offshot of this is that while it’s intuitively obvious that a small space like a garage will quickly fill up with toxic gasses, it’s far less intuitive that a “very big” outside can get saturated by a “pretty big number” of cars.
If it is common knowledge that shutting a garage door with a running ICE vehicle inside will kill you, why do you think so many people think 1 billion ICE vehicles aren’t bad in the atmosphere?
The problem with having a running ICE vehicle in an enclosed space is that you reduce the oxygen levels in that space and your vehicle then starts rapidly dumping carbon monoxide out the tailpipe, which is dangerous to humans at much lower levels than carbon dioxide exposure.
This isn’t related to the issue we have with carbon dioxide emissions producing global warming.
We aren’t going to reduce global oxygen levels far enough that vehicles dumping carbon monoxide out their tailpipes and asphyxiating people becomes an issue.
Yes, the carbon monoxide sits in the atmosphere… Then becomes carbon dioxide after a few months, which is racking up and killing the majority of life on earth.
The garage is just step 1 of the process, yes.
im gonna hazard a really basic proposition.
The volume of the earths atmosphere is perhaps, just a little bit bigger than the volume of approximately 1 billion garages.
If you’re going to shitpost about science, at least be accurate about it. Nobody thinks they “aren’t bad” that’s literally a fallacious argument to even propose. Sure, toxic chemicals are bad for you, but there are FDA defined limits for how much of them is considered to be safe on an annual basis.
also, “banning” larger heavier vehicles is based.
So how much carbon monoxide turning into CO2 and building up in the atmosphere and causing the earths temperature to slowly rise and threaten the ecosystems of the majority of earth does the FDA define as okay?
Cars don’t typically produce carbon monoxide. It’s special circumstances caused by the garage that caused the carbon monoxide
this is definitely a good point.
restricted or incomplete combustion has really negative side effects. Notably, more pollution.
Isn’t the main purpose of the catalytic converter to minimize the CO (and other chemicals) being exhausted? Those illegal to take off vehicles things on every car…
It is supposed to be CO2 and water though that comes out of it… but it doesn’t work out so clean as the air going in isn’t just oxygen
That is what they’re supposed to do.
But you’re talking about an operating environment way outside of what they were designed for.ICE cars suck.
But cars driving around the road and spewing out CO in such concentration that’d they’d give someone CO poisoning.Pick a different example about why ICE cars clearly suck.
The CO becomes CO2 in the atmosphere as well eventually. I understand what you mean, which is why I was going to originally delete the post, but some people said leave it, so I did. Really it is just saying if exhaust is so obviously known to be bad in one situation, why is it so hard to understand that it can be bad in other ways. (Trapping in heat really)
I kinda get what you mean, in that sense. “It’s bad here so why can’t you believe it’s bad there?”
But the dangers they pose are so different in nature that it’s inviting criticism; lots of things are dangerous in specific circumstances but fine normally.
Anyways, you’re taking the criticism better than I’m able to lol
It was a drunken post on New Year’s Eve… If I know anything in life it’s that alcohol does not make sound choices lol. I suppose I’m just glad I didn’t text an ex. Motivation not to drink as much haha
im gonna hazard a little guess, and say they don’t define this, because this would be like the FDA having recommended estimates for how many hurricanes you can consume within approximately a year, as that would be a rather silly statistic. They probably don’t do that one.
Little known fun fact, the FDA is actually short hand for “food and drug administration” if you’re concerned about like, global warming you should ask someone else like NASA. Which handles things related to the atmosphere. There would also be NOAA, which more directly handles the atmosphere, that’s kind of it’s job, you should probably ask them.
The FDA requires me to eat 4 hurricanes a year, with a side of has browns, haha
(I think it’s the CDC that does regulations on carbon monoxide though)
im guessing OSHA probably has a few also. Most definitely some health agency, though i wouldn’t be surprised if the FDA did have something pertaining to carbon monoxide, more generically. They have a lot of weird ones.
EPA I assume as well. Lots of letter factories out there
A very, very rough estimate is that the atmosphere is 6,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than a typical garage (or over 6 orders of magnitude more than OP’s claim), based on a typical one-car garage being 100 cubic meters and The atmosphere being 6e9 cubic kilometers.
Because most people are completely scientifically illiterate and do not understand the analogy you’re making because they don’t know what “atmosphere” is.
Reminds me of those threads “do you think you’re smarter than most people” of course anyone who responds either calls themselves a dumbass or agrees. But it’s always a biased question, because if you are sentient enough to understand the question you ARE smarter than most people.
Most people don’t think of that. Out of sight, out of mind. Our minds are better adapted to react to immediate, visceral threats (such as a garage full of exhaust that can be smelled, maybe seen). We need education to be able to understand threats that are diffuse over a large area or take long periods of time to manifest. Even with education, most won’t react as strongly to a threat which has a high chance of reducing our lifespan by five to ten years, as we will to a threat which has a small chance of killing us immediately.
