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?
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?
"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?
This is a bad argument. Your conclusion happens to be factual, but it doesn't follow from the premises.
Being in an enclosed space with an internal combustion engine will kill you because of the CO buildup, and no, that doesn't happen in the open air. CO does oxidise to CO2 eventually, so it doesn't just keep building up in the atmosphere.
The main harm caused by burning fossil fuels is the CO2, which is wreaking havoc on the climate and will kill billions - but not by poisoning them.
Why would it not be considered poisoning? It is a substance that is effectively killing people.
Yeah the enclosed space thing is about carbon monoxide though. Just find it to be easier for people to understand when people believe the earth is thriving because "there are more people now than ever." Not caring that everything is dying around us.
It is also common knowledge that taking a bath with a running lamp will kill you, why do you think that has absolutely no impact in people's buying lamps?
A car running in a small enclosed space is very different from a car running in the open in the same way that a lamp running underwater is very different from a lamp running in air.
That being said I do believe we should strive to have personal vehicles and public transportation be converted to EVs as soon as possible, because the issues with running ICEs vehicles in the open (which are different from running them indoors)
I had a friend who went down the right wing rabbit hole and he said that the earth is so big we can't affect the environment that way.
Blew my mind. Trump supporter now as well.
Usually people like this start with the conclusion, and then search only for things that reinforce that (and ignore anything that conflicts). So, chances are, he wanted to believe that for whatever reason, so he sought reinforcement for that stupid idea. And found it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
wow incomprehensibly large number, exactly what my shitpost predicted!
I'm not here to diss EVs or praise ICE vehicles, but I want to simply directly answer your question. There's one simple mantra that is applicable to a lot of things in life...the dose makes the poison. Not odd to see people extrapolate to that your scenario.
In one, although the quantity is greater, you're "diluting" the gas into the humongous atmosphere. In the other, you're taking the gas straight up undiluted.
Look, I hate ICE cars too.
But this is whack. Putting a running car into a garage is dangerous because the free oxygen becomes depleted and it starts producing carbon monoxide as a result. This isn't a problem when you're driving around outdoors.
The reason the a running ICE car in a garage is dangerous is completely different than why ICE cars are bad for the environment.
Like, shit on ICE cars all you want, I'll support it. But this is embarrassingly bad science. This is the kind of shit I'd have made up in grade 7 trying to an edgy eco-aware statement.
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.
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.
Edit: was looking at the serious answers. I apologize for my sarcasm.
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about stars to dispute it.
Plus you get a nice smokey smell.
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.
People mostly believe whatever is in their interest to believe. No one's beliefs are 100% internally consistent.
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
In theory, concentration and expose time could mean that whatever is hurting you in an enclosed garage isn't a problem outside. Which is some what true. Carbon monoxide bonding to the hemoglobin in your blood cells is what kills you in the first scenario. The CO2 levels take a lot longer to rise to dangerous levels and there's plenty of warning to leave the area before fixation becomes an issue and it's still not the same issue as climate change.
In reality, it's propaganda. But if you want to argue with people, don't use the enclosed space as an example. Batteries can also offgas and quite frankly, I wouldn't store some of those cheaper EVs in a garage or at least, an attached garage.
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.
Not sure about the egulf, but the Volt in Australia is a Holden badge and I am pretty sure is a hybrid. The cheapest you can get here is a Nissan leaf, which I honestly had no idea existed until now.
Regardless, all manufacturers are adding electric to a lot of their range, as the years go, they'll be cheaper second hand and I bet that's when adoption will sky-rocket.
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 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.
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.
Actually going to delete this. To pointed of a question I believe. Just annoyed by people not giving a shit about our grandchildren
It's not the people don't think cars are bad for the environment. It's that people consider the nebulous cost to be worth the short-term benefit of actually being able to get places.
While I understand what I think your saying and don't want to be to assumptioius, can you please explain how cars have a 'shorr term" benefit when we are looking at 60% annual possibilities of 10 month droughts annually. That's the end of crops outdoors, likely the end of life outdoors
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.
You also die from staying inside a single room for too long
Ban rooms!
But doors being closed is what effectively triggers death, right ? shouldn't we ban doors ?
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.
it's not that people think cars aren't contributing, it's that things like factories are so much of a bigger deal that the cars won't make a difference.
Are they? Pretty sure transportation is a big part of CO2 emissions.
they do produce a lot of CO2, but other things produce so much more (and can be fixed without the cost being passed entirely onto regular people who can't afford the car they already have) that cars are a non-issue. yes the number is big, but other numbers like factories are bigger by so much that the cars' number is actually really small in comparison. it isn't your fault, it is the fault of things like factories. you are being manipulated by rich people who don't want to spend an extra 13 cents per item to save the planet, so they convince you to focus on your car instead of their factories.
So would you agree no car sold beyond 2030 in the U.S. should weight over 5 thousand pounds or be taxed and registered (another form of tax) at a high rate the pushes users towards lighter emissions?
What's a "butt tire"?
One of the main reasons people use to say EVs are bad is that they currently weigh more than ICE vehicles. (Slowly being fixed transitioning to solid state batteries and finding ways to safely minimize weight). The extra weight means tires would wear out faster and tires put plastics into the environment.
Putting weight restrictions on vehicles would curb this and accelerate people transitioning to lighter vehicles.
Tires are a big pollutant (from wearing them down) and anti-EV people often day EVs weigh More, thus wear tires more, cancelling out any environmental benefits.
A bit forced and hogwash IMO.
Tire wear is a huge cause of particle pollution, but the wear depends on the driver right foot.
Just start sabotaging the
manufactorumsfactories.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.
Because if the earth doesn't want it, it has ways of shutting down that kind of thing.