“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?
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.
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.
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.
