“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.
So your saying there’s enough plants to offest cars in the world? Or is that no longer relevant?I
up voting by the by for encouraging conversations as I feel up items should be
I am saying that the logic of your question does not accurately describe the actual problems with CO2, which are their effect on solar heating.
An anti-environmentalist would say that the number of plants on the planet is not fixed, and that a higher CO2 level in the atmosphere would increase global plant mass. They would say “Higher CO2 levels make the planet greener”, and point to 4th grade biology to support their point.
I say, again, that the problems with CO2 are not the biological effects. The problems with CO2 are the effects on solar insolation. If CO2 did not affect solar insolation, we would be looking to increase CO2 levels, to benefit vegetation.
Makes sense, but they do affect the insolation, and thus kill life on earth.
We can’t live without it, but we can’t live with to much of it. So if we are pushing the upwards bounds… which way should we go? Only one logical choice if you want our current life forms to exist.
I never said we can’t live without fossil-fuel powered vehicles. We certainly can go full electric, and we can broadly adopt solar, wind, wave, and tidal energy sources. We can use the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuels and lubricants from biomass and leaking methane deposits instead of crude oil or coal. (Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2; we currently try to “flare” methane sources to produce CO2 rather than allow them to vent naturally. It makes far more sense to use these sources productively than to simply burn them off.)
So what your saying is we need cars powered by cow flatulence. /s