375
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
375 points (100.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
16371 readers
208 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
i think this is about toxic gases emissions vs CO2 emissions. while CO2 emissions have probably gone up somewhat (my guesstimate is +30% since 1970), the toxic gas emissions have almost completely gone to zero. there was a whole lot more toxic gases around in the 20th century industry and machinery, you had to cough constantly, we just don't remember it because it's comparatively clean now.
Toxic emissions have absolutely not gone down to zero. High respiration activities next to a highway still get you a solid dose of toxic stuff. Yes, it would be much worse with 1970s vehicles but it would be much better if the majority of vehicles sold today would not be able to use the regulatory SUV/truck loophole to be able to pollute more. This loophole is not just about CO2.
I witnessed myself what a huge impact on air quality it had on a street to see heavy two lane traffic gone and that had nothing to do with CO2 and it was even without that loophole you have in the US.
do you have any numbers how much toxic emission there is today compared to 1970?
No but I have a nose and lungs and I can smell the difference next to roads with jammed heavy traffic, it ain't the CO2 and I am not simply imagining pollutants.
"almost completely zero toxic emissions" is a fairy tale. Respiratory issues remain to be a bigger issue in cities for a reason.
Toxic emissions from road traffic remain as major health problem in the US: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107402118 (not the newest data but you are not claiming that in the 10 years since, everything has changed ro the beeter,are you?), even if progress has been made. I can't wait to see those dirty combudtion engines (no matter how much you purify the exhaust) vanish from the streets. In Europe we are on the way at least even if China will ve likely faster
well sounds to me like deaths from toxic emissions sank by roughly 60% from 2008 to 2017. it's not "almost down to zero" in that time frame but a lot has happened between 1960 and 2008 too.