deronmoped said:
What's the big deal.
...
I'm sure if VW wanted to, they could of done their polluting legally. they just did not buy the right politicians.
It seems strange to watch this daily parade of giant SUV driving parents cycling kids to and from school daily. Most freshly started (still in fuel enrichment stages to increase rate of catalytic converter light-off) and spewing visible vapor clouds that include a startling plethora of bio-hazardous compounds.
Why is there an 'acceptable' amount of known carcinogenic, mutagenic solvents to vaporize/atomize into places of high probability for something alive to be breathing?
I'm only left guessing that a widespread ignorance of the medical significance of the situation is still commonplace.
In compassion for all living beings, please share awareness of what we are unnecessarily dosing ourselves and our kids with:
Mutagens are substances and mixtures which, if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin, may induce heritable genetic damage or increase its incidence.
A carcinogen is a substance that may cause cancer or increase its incidence by inhalation, ingestion or skin absorption.
Former Dangerous Substances Directive, known as DSD (67/548/EEC),
Why do I see loving parents daily spraying impressively potent forms of these materials into random children faces twice daily at the school entrance/exit ritual? Even if you drive an EV, the implications are that depending on how the breeze is and which SUVs are starting and stopping at different times, you and/or your childs life becomes more likely to include otherwise needless cancer experiences, and also a meaningful probabilistic increase at becoming permanently reproductively damaged to have a higher probability rate of genetically defective/damaged offspring.
Even in the meantime before universal EV adoption, at least stagger drop-off and pick-up times at schools to avoid a daily parade of randomly starting from sitting (and therefore 100% likely to be spraying these toxic solvent clouds prior to catalyzer light-off temperatures being achieved), sprayed into an area of high human population density. Maybe have an ICE vehicle drop-off area at far corner of a field (ideally minimizing population density for exposure), and ICE vehicles leave the engine running with known-lit catalytic converter. Parking lot attendants, gas station workers and cab drivers, valet drivers should be provided personal protective gear rated for whatever the real measured exposure levels happen to be. It's not a very good trade to work a gas-station job if each day breathing the air means along with your paycheck you also get a dice-roll for cancer/DNA corruption with each time you breathe the exhaust of a recently started car or catch the scent of gas.
Thank you for your awesome EV work and inspiration here, help me share awareness of the often understated costs (in life and yet-unborn-lives, and if you care about money, $$$ in cancer treatment costs).
On this forum, it is a pleasure to know many of us already have found it's possible to live better than this as a species, while also being more thrilling and magic-carpet-esque amazing.
The Electric Revolution will hit it's critical mass conversion far faster than any economic-driven metric would predict. It will spread at the rate of human awareness the current system involves meaningfully and indiscriminately dosing each-other with compounds that cause multi-generations of needless damage.
What VW violated by such an impressive magnitude is less nasty in many ways, it's more like WW1 era chemical weapon. Myself and a friend had an experience with Nitrogen-Dioxide gas around 8th grade when the very low budget DIY Tesla-coil's spark-gap was opened after an impressive few minutes straight of continuous run-time (normally it would randomly fail somewhere before long). The spark-gap was an old sour-cream tub with a copper wire poking in each side and now it appeared to be fairly uniformly stained a strange yellow. Neither of us realized the container we just pulled the lid off was now filled with NO2 gas generated by the plasma arc of the spark-gap, which is heavy and looks yellowish brown, and both of us bent down to check if it smelled burned... It's an interesting experience, less-unpleasant than my hydrogen-sulfide and hydrogen-fluoride and ozone accidental gas exposures from an overall perspective, but maybe only better than those things.
wikipedia Nitrogen dioxide disproportionates into nitric acid and nitrous acid in aqueous solution:[2]
2 NO2 + H2O → HNO3 + HNO2
Yes, HNO3 is also called Nitric Acid, which is exactly the acid it makes everywhere the gas contacts a moist surface. Some moist surfaces of concern may include sinuses, eyeballs, throat/mouth, lungs etc which cause chemical burns and scaring. It doesn't take long to do this damage either, amazingly a 6% lung function impact even in young children tested living near the freeways where diesel's parade about delivering a gas that on contact with any moist surface becomes Nitric Acid of all things.
The lung functioning of children living within 100 meters of a major roadway was on average 6 percent lower than that of children living 400 meters or more away, said the lead author Mary B. Rice, instructor at Harvard Medical School in US. For the study, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care, the team studied 614 children born between 1999 and 2002. -
The electric revolution will become a product of mass nearly universal demand by an aware population, not something that happens when some analyst calculates based on oil prices or whatever graphs of adoption rates in a largely un-aware and un-health-risk-educated population in a world where venues like social media can share new awareness to critical-mass sized groups worldwide in a day.
ICE's relevancy is only social awareness of the health impacts away from a dead technology in everything but rockets and airliners. Cargo boats can all be solar electric (entirely possible, they just travel slower using todays technology), rather than burning "bunker oil", AKA, everything they prohibited from being in the gasoline to go get burned in engines which have no form of emissions controls at all typically.
Hydrogen's only logical place to explore is aircraft and rockets, and even then it's kinda sketchy with it's 1% to 99% air-fuel flammability window, being as virtually no materials can contain hydrogen without continuously leaking it to some extent. It's pointless thermodynamic penalty and total system complexity, risk and upkeep have not and continue not to make sense from the perspective of anyone except someone desperately trying to find a new product to sell you because they know the days of carelessly pumping our tanks with carcinogenic mutagenic solvents to indiscriminately spurt about in clouds of vapor will no longer be welcomed as a cultural practice long before the oil they currently sell you runs out.
Look at the feedback data from drivers who tried even crude first gen EV's, impressively few say they would ever have interest in purchasing a new ICE vehicle for any reason at any price. As more EV's enter neighborhoods, inevitably more people will experience EV's and choose to conclude being a sucker at gas stations to fund random wars and poison themselves and their kids and amazingly even their kids kids (mutagen's are like something that must violate something in the Geneva convention by causing permanent and even potentially fatal damage to innocent yet-unborn un-conceived humans).
Where is the governments human rights issues on randomly fogging deadly compounds along with there citizens to collectively poison themselves and there kids and almost like something out of a SciFi. Only on an oil-company backed system would considder giving future generations genetic defects as OK provided the amounts are below XX amount while operated, yet while on restart, and quite a while on a cold restart it just spews these deadly vapors in a toxic cloud.
Humans will choose to live better as a species when they know they can and choose to make decisions that respect themselves as a species.