The Other Big Reason To Decarbonize The Way We Drive
Tailpipe emissions are gnarly, awful, health-wrecking pollution — dumped right into our neighborhoods
When we talk about the need to electrify vehicles, it’s often posed as a very global issue. We need to power cars and trucks with renewable energy so we can curtail greenhouse gases, right?
But there’s another big reason to electrify the way we drive, and it’s not global. It’s super local:
Vehicle exhaust.
It is gnarly, nasty stuff, and it can seriously mess with our health.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the last four days, because I’ve begun cycling cross-country, from Brooklyn to the Pacific coast. I’m spending six or seven hours a day riding (most often) alongside cars and trucks. So I’m getting a very close-up, intimate sample of the pollution that tailpipes dump into our local environments.
Every time I stop at a light in a town, I get stewed in an acrid cloud of exhaust. Even while riding down bucolic country roads, if several vehicles in a row drive by, the lovely field-scented air becomes temporarily clotted with fumes.
Your body keeps the score on this. When I was passing through New Jersey down to Philadelphia, my…
