i recently attended a training where we were informed that a degraded compound from tires breaks the blood-brain barrier in salmon and causes them to die.

Not to belittle the actual problem of tire rubber particulates, but the wording of the headline is very consistent with a green nationalist focus on "pollution" and "clean air" that minimizes exactly how many orders of magnitude more dangerous GHG emissions are than anything like this.

Also, even this is total bullshit - "more particle pollution by mass?" So CO2 is not a particle? A typical car emits waaaay more CO2 by mass in a month than the mass of an entire set of tires.

Again, not to minimize the actual cause for concern, but wording like this actively minimizes the climate apocalypse that the developed world has created and is sustaining.

i've always been a bit skeptical of the hyperfocus on CO₂ emissions as a proxy for pollution but

more particle pollution by mass

is suspiciously specific. No i will not click on the article.

Fucking hate those bigass trucks I used to see in Upstate New York. I saw more of them when I went a year ago and those bigass trucks almost always had US flags plastered all over them and a blue-line flag somewhere on the back. You'd get the occasional "don't tread on me" stuff as well.

There's four of them for every car too, and each car will go through several sets in it's life. Tires don't just dissolve into thin air, these toxic compounds are literally ground into powder and flushed into our rivers every time it rains.

tires are one of the biggest source of microplastics, too!

I hate cars I hate cars I hate cars I hate cars

microplastics for the microplastic god

Post the link

Yeah, and if we replace every non-electric car with a electric car...you realize that producing an electric car is polluting!

By "bigger ones" I assume this is strictly in an American point of which yeah I agree, there is nothing green about an electric F-150 or whatever.

But we can make small and lightweight cars, these actually exist elsewhere in China and even some in Europe. Of course the American car culture is irredeemable, burn and destroy it all or don't and let climate change do it for you anyway.

We all agree that cars themselves are a problem, but let me bang the drum a little on remote work because holy crap is that an easy way to greatly reduce car trips.

I happened to take a hybrid job (3 days remote/2 days in office) not long after losing a car to a deer, and let me tell you, despite living in exactly the kind of rural area that cars will always be a requirement to live in, having a hybrid job allowed my family to switch to being a single car family. It took a whole friggin car off the road!

If one can incentivize hybrid and remote work for all jobs that can be performed hybrid/remotely at a national level (take your pick on the nation too!) that would be a very low cost (if not increasing revenue for governments through fines and/or savings) way to greatly reduce how many car trips/miles are driven by car everywhere! That's great for the environment, that's great for traffic, that's great for road maintenance, that's great for workers, and its great for businesses!

Independent of tires, lithium extraction is an environmental nightmare of its own, AFAIK, and if I'm remembering right, all of the fossil fuels used in producing a car make up a full half of the amount of CO2 it's responsible for across its lifetime. Electric cars are PART of a solution, and a small one at that.

Are those particles greenhouse gasses?

I'm steel on steel baby