Ask Lemmy

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.

Because if the earth doesn't want it, it has ways of shutting down that kind of thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

30 people die a day just in Australia from traffic pollution.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-24/air-pollution-modelling-university-of-melbourne-traffic/102015778

I think it's safe to say people literally don't give a fcuk.

Because most people are completely scientifically illiterate and do not understand the analogy you're making because they don't know what "atmosphere" is.

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.

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.....

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)

People struggle to think on a global scale and if you don't understand how the atmosphere insulates, "that's inside and this is outside" is a convincing enough argument for a lot of folk. Throw on the fact that some of the most powerful institutions in the world have very strong interests in keeping ICEs going and it's pretty easy to see why so many people still believe those myths

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You also die from staying inside a single room for too long

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.

People mostly believe whatever is in their interest to believe. No one's beliefs are 100% internally consistent.

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.