apples, fresh air and cynical comments are all relatively safe!
Funny you should mention apples, are you old enough to remember the scare connected to the chemical sprayed on apples to make them look good? The time frame of the 1980’s sticks in my mind, but not totally sure.
Cars as we know them now will be gone in less than 30 years, so there is no need to panic.
People who always want horses back, don’t realize the maintenance and cost involved in horse ownership. Its too bad the old western movies didn’t show the amount of horse poop everywhere and the millions of flies associated with said poop and horses.
Name me just one thing that *doesn't* cause cancer.Distilled water?
Cars as we know them now will be gone in less than 30 years, so there is no need to panic.Didn't they say that 30 or more years ago?
Hows about you start a NPR program about Granola Living and maybe in 33 years you can have the reach that Tom and Ray have; complete with your own chat room. Car talk is about (guess what) CARS! When Granola Talk is running full swing it would be just as inappropriate for me to post inquiries about how come we don’t switch back to CFCs in aerosols, PVC for packaging materials, and extra dolphin in our tuna.
Beautiful!!! Shadowfax, you are my new hero!
Of course, the very same things (and many more) that the OP said about cars can be said about the sun, the weather, and lots of other things. So what? We all get to die at some time of something or other. Why spend the time between now and then in fear and trembling, even if doing so does give you an excuse to be self-righteous and to lecture other folks?
Good graphic (that certainly applies here).
yes they did
Compared to the alternatives cars come out way on top.
You don?t think we should use horses, like we did back at 1800?s do you? Sorry but compared to a horse a car wins out big time. In fact it?s because of cars that we live as long as we do. If you think car exhaust is bad horse exhaust is much worst for people and the environment. In most cities before cars took over, the biggest problem was what to do with all the horse waste. Straw, manure, urine were huge problems. It polluted everything water, streets, air. It was everywhere the dust in the air was mostly manure it got on the food, water. It was probably the biggest factor in the life expectancy between city and the country in the 1800?s. In a city you?d be luck to make it to 50 while in the country odd were you?d live past 50.
Bicycle, yea it?s -20 and I?ll just bike to work, I think not.
Bus- mass transit- except for the cities mass transit really doesn?t work and wastes a lot of fuel driving all over the place with few or no passengers.
As far as asthma goes, it been pretty much proven that the asthma epidemic we?re seeing isn?t the result of car it because we?ve (people) become too clean. As the rest of the world?s people become cleaner their and our bodies don?t have the germs to fight so it overreacts to pollen etc. So cars aren?t to blame for that one either.
But if you have a plan to get rid of car go ahead and post it, anyone can complain few give alternatives or solutions to the problem.
My opinions are subject to change with new facts.
What do you mean it has been proven that the asthma epidemic isn’t the result of cars? Where do you get that? Air pollution and asthma are inextricably linked (there are also other factors, many of them also the result of modern products.)
About the solutions – well first of all I think the reaction of many people to this info is bizarre and, frankly, psychologically twisted. If something in their houses was killing off one of their children, they would react immediately to get rid of that thing, they would react to the emergency that it is. But people hear that cars cause cancer and asthma (and don’t forget the slaughter of car accidents) and they just say “oh, but the alternative is not convenient”. As a society and as a world we have to stop ignoring the elephant in the room, so to speak, and do this.
Mass transit is the way. I live in Europe for 15 years car free, and I traveled from Portugal to Moscow without a car. If Europe can be interconnected with trains, so can the USA. And going bike-based is also – in Amsterdam there are more bikes than cars on the roads. When it’s cold you take the subway or the trams.
We have got to get our heads out of the sand and do this. We are killing our environment and ourselves.
Did you go after the obvious right wing trolls in the forum about Juan Williams and NPR? Or do you just cry troll when faced with inconvenient truth?
If this is your reaction to a necessary, heavily regulated (EPA, CARB, etc) part of life that has seen huge improvements over the last 30+ years, I’m curious about your involvment in eliminating obvious, unnessary, and documented causes of a growing cancer epidemic - skin cancer caused by excessive sun exposure, often through tanning booths, etc. Your energy might better be spent there, where there are obvious opportunities to save lives.
As for ‘trains across the USA’, where will the many billions of dollars come from? And might that money be spent more effectively elsewhere?
As for your original ‘cars cause cancer’ statement, based on a California addendum to an owner’s manual - those are common on many items that are sold in California, in response both to statewide paranoia and companies’ fear of lawyers.
If you ever have a chance to see the ABC news show “Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death”, watch it. It is a great discussion about how people’s priorities on risk are not at all related to the actual risks they face.
If you think that taking note of cancer and breathing problems due to the car industry (not to mention the epidemic level of slaughter of car deaths and injuries) is the result of paranoia and lawyers, you are in denial about the problems.
As for the cost of trains across USA, I ask you where did the money come from for the trains across Europe? Why can they do it and we can’t? What happened to America’s can-do spirit?
Europe’s short routes throught highly-populated areas are like the US northeast where there are lots of trains. Not like anywhere else in the US.
Car death rate in the us is a small fraction of what it was 40 years ago.
And yes, I continue to feed the troll…will stop now.
I thought you didn’t want to get personal, yet I’m a repub?
The distance from Vienna to Paris is 640 miles and you can take a train. Why not between every large US city that are the same or less distance apart? The US would be covered that way.
About your other thing, it’s a real cop out to cry troll when you don’t like someone’s opinion or you’re afraid you might be wrong. It makes it seem like you can’t handle dissent.
Well, a troll is someone being deliberately obtuse, one who ignores every reasonable counter arguement…how many cities between Vienna and Paris? How many tens of millions of people? How about between ‘every large US city’? A tiny fraction of that.