Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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Tire dust isn’t contributing to climate change, and air pollution from fossil fuel combustion is a known contributor to reduced life expectancy.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/06/14/air-pollution-takes-2-ye...

> Air pollution, which is primarily the result of burning fossil fuels, takes 2.2 years of the global life expectancy for each person, according to a new report out Tuesday from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).

> For comparison, that's a smidge more the decline in average life expectancy caused by smoking, more than three times that of alcohol use and unsafe water, six times that of HIV/AIDS, and 89 times that of conflict and terrorism.

Light vehicles aren’t going away (although more mass transit and cycling infra is always welcome), so requiring them be EVs is an improvement. We can then continue on to solve for tire pollution.

I'm not denying that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change. I'm arguing that in terms of peoples personal vehicles, the vast majority of particulate polution (3 orders of magnitude more) comes from the tire dust rather than the tailpipe. Tire dust is basically microplastics. It gets into your lungs and sticks around, and is also associated with reduced life expectancy and poor health. It's a significant source of PM2.5, which is estimated to be responsible for 95% of the global public health impact from air pollution. It also of course damages ecosystems when it runs off into our watersheds.

https://jalopnik.com/tire-dust-is-the-ddt-of-our-generation-...

That's true that taking a vehicle and replacing it with an EV makes a lot of sense and would reduce pollution, but to me that depends on them being equal weights. Usually EVs are substantially heavier than equivalent ICE cars, so this would mean we trade one form of emissions (less tailpipe emissions) for another (more tire dust). I'm not sure if that would pencil out to be overall better, considering the tailpipe emissions from a modern (last 25 years we will call it) are responsible for so little of the particulate pollution to begin with, and adding on another 1000lbs to a given car frame represents a massive proportional increase in weight. I wonder if larger cars mean wider or larger tires, and what that might do for particulate generation as well?

Maybe one solution is to have "urban cars" running off of powered catenaries and very small batteries, rather than larger and heavier battery packs, almost like a trollybus.

> larger cars

And super torquey cars! 0-60 in 2 seconds!

Yeah, that will peel off some rubber

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