“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?
To directly answer the question you asked in the title:
ICE vehicles and animals consume oxygen and produce CO2. Plants produce oxygen and consume CO2. Your car’s exhaust is poisonous to the animals in your garage, not to the plants. The plants love your car.
The problems with atmospheric CO2 have nothing to do with biological effects. The problem with atmospheric CO2 is its effect on solar insolation.
I wouldn’t use this analogy in an argument with someone who does not understand anthropogenic climate change.
Also worth noting another key issue with car exhaust in a confined space is carbon monoxide, you’ll feel the CO2 build up and make it difficult to breath in your environment before it does any damage, the CO on the other hand will kill you quietly. CO breaks down relatively quickly in the environment by reacting with other substances in the air, so it’s not really a long term pollutant concern.
There’s also other chemicals and particulates, but they’re mostly going to be at lower concentrations that aren’t going to kill you in a hurry, but may contribute to longer term cancer risks and such, but that’s a little harder for people to wrap their heads around. You won’t immediately die of cancer in your garage from breathing exhaust but it might give you cancer years or decades down the line.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
cats are supposed to burn off the remaining unburnt fuel in the exhaust, as ICEs don’t have perfect combustion most of the time. Which helps to reduce the negative aspects. Not the CO2 though, obviously.
of course, this only works if you get significantly complete combustion within the engine itself, otherwise the cat simply can’t overcome it, it’s only supposed to do the last 5-10% or whatever, of emissions.
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
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.
