Diesel Cars Contribute To 5,000 Premature Deaths a Year In Europe, Says Study (phys.org) 215
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Emissions from diesel cars rigged to appear eco-friendly may be responsible for 5,000 air pollution deaths per year in Europe alone, according to a study published on Monday. The numbers are in line with previous assessments of deaths due to the so-called "Dieselgate" scandal, which erupted when carmaker Volkswagen admitted in 2015 to cheating on vehicle emissions tests. Many other carmakers have since fallen under suspicion. The researchers from Norway, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands calculated that about 10,000 deaths in Europe per year can be attributed to small particle pollution from light duty diesel vehicles (LDDVs). Almost half of these would have been avoided if emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars on the road had matched levels measured in the lab. If diesel cars emitted as little NOx as petrol ones, almost 4,000 of the 5,000 premature deaths would have been avoided, said the authors. The countries with the heaviest burden are Italy, Germany, and France, the team added, "resulting from their large populations and high share of diesel cars in their national fleets." Touted as less polluting, the share of diesel cars in Europe rose fast compared to petrol since the 1990s, and now comprise about half the fleet. There are more than 100 million diesel cars in Europe today, twice as many as in the rest of the world together, said the study authors. Diesel engines emit less planet-warming carbon dioxide than petrol ones, but significantly more NOx. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Well, if it also causes that many premature births (Score:5, Funny)
Then we're even, right?
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In the short run, yes.
And what's a 'premature death'? (Score:1)
Usually, if you read the small print, it means something like 'someone who was seriously ill and would have died a few weeks later anyway.' In other words, pretty much totally irrelevant to anything but the Green agenda.
What's the definition used in this study?
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" Diesel engines emit less planet-warming carbon dioxide than petrol ones, but significantly more NOx."
So... the green agenda people should be happy with diesel cars, right?
Global Cooling! (Score:1)
Its even worse than that..
NOx reacts with Methane to remove it from the atmosphere, and Methane is much MUCH worse that CO2 with regards to greenhouse effects.
Estimates vary, however the accepted figure appears to be that the net effect of global diesel use is 20% net cooling effect.
So yes, Diesel contributes to global cooling! Climate change! Disaster!
(Also, lightning creates about the same amount of NOx as small vehicles, and both are much less than shipping, aircraft, or heavy industry..)
Nitrogen oxides (Score:3)
Its even worse than that. NOx reacts with Methane to remove it from the atmosphere, and Methane is much MUCH worse that CO2 with regards to greenhouse effects.
News flash: oxygen reacts with methane to remove it from the atmosphere. Nitrogen oxides are 0.00003% of the atmosphere. Oxygen is 20% of the atmosphere. Putting more nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere has a negative effect on health, but doesn't reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere enough to notice.
Estimates vary, however the accepted figure appears to be that the net effect of global diesel use is 20% net cooling effect.
Another news flash: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
So yes, Diesel contributes to global cooling! Climate change! Disaster!
To repeat: making shit up really isn't a substitute for science.
(Also, lightning creates about the same amount of NOx as small vehicles, and both are much less than shipping, aircraft, or heavy industry..)
Lightning produces some nitrogen oxides. Specifically, "over
Sorry, no Global Cooling! (Score:2)
Perhaps you don't remember this far back, but "global cooling" actually was the widely hyped fear back in the 1960s and part of the 1970s.
No, it wasn't. That claim is something deniers say all the time, but it just isn't true. Here, for example, is the American Meteorological Society: http://journals.ametsoc.org/do... [ametsoc.org]
I know a lot of people today (many of whom were born in the 1980s or even the 1990s!) will wrongly claim that it was only "the media" pushing those claims back then, but the media was just reporting on what those in various scientific fields were claiming.
I was born in the 1950s, and you are wrong.
It wasn't until into the 1970s that the "global warming" hype really started up.
Wrong again. Here's the American Institute of Physics's history of Global Warming: https://history.aip.org/climat... [aip.org] -- the effect has been known for well over a century.
I remember the greenhouse effect being discussed in my science classes back in high school. Of course, back the
The article is bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
These two types of emission must be viewed separately. While small particles are solid particles in the size of less than
Re:The article is bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
As usual, you can't just assume it's that simple. PM2.5 particles can also be formed by chemical processes from precursor NOx emissions, adding to the levels from direct emissions.
In fact, according to this study [epa.gov], secondary formation of PM2.5 from NOx emissions can be surprisingly high:
Based on an analysis of the composition of the PM2.5 measured in the United States, the percentages of the PM2.5 formed by precursor NOx and VOC compounds is quite variable. The portion of PM2.5 comprised of all secondary components (sulfates, nitrates, ammonium, organic carbon) varies anywhere from 30% to 90% of all PM2.5.
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In fact, according to this study, secondary formation of PM2.5 from NOx emissions can be surprisingly high:
Sure, but according to that study, formation of PM2.5 from VOC precursors (m-xylene and toluene are called out as the most common culprits) is a more serious problem than formation of PM2.5 from NOx precursors. And guess which technology spews more VOCs into the air? Yep, it's gasoline. Further, all of the PM2.5 created by reacting NOx with the atmosphere is shorter-lived than the carbon soot that gasoline and diesel vehicles produce in roughly equal proportion to the amount of fuel burned — virtually
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Do you have any further reading on that? I'm curious about comparative numbers.
In any case, we're fast approaching the point where the tradeoff won't be necessary anymore, so hopefully we can start saving some of the 2-3 million lives lost each year to PM2.5 effects.
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Nitric oxide (NO) is fine, but nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is classified as an extremely hazardous substance [wikipedia.org], and kills [newscientist.com] tens of thousands annually in the UK alone. And that's in addition to the particulates formed, which kill millions [wikipedia.org] globally.
Maybe read up a bit more before waving stuff off as fake news.
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You do smell the obNOxious smell of NO2.
No, because if you can smell NOx it then you're failing the 10+ year old emission standards, ... by a large margin.
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Well yes... I'm sorry were you trying to say something? Was I praising VW? I assure you they still make shit cars.
Does VW get any credit for this criminality? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does VW get any credit for this criminality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah they all get off free.
Oh except for the VW executive who was arrested at the airport while on holiday and has been stuck in jail for the past 1/3rd of the year.
And the 5 other senior executives who also have been had criminal cases brought against them, though currently they are in Germany so if the USA wants to do something it will have to be via extradition.
Don't let that ruin your narrative though.
Re:Does VW get any credit for this criminality? (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember one interesting paper I read in my undergraduate psych course which made a lot of intuitive sense: the experiment showed that the likelihood of punishment had a much stronger effect on subject behavior than the severity of punishment. Think of how everyone slows down when they see a cop car parked on the side of the road, but they blithely sail past signs announcing that speeding fines are doubled.
Imagine a universe in which someone involved in the kind of fraud VW did was fined, say, 5% of his annual wages -- a mere slap on the wrist compared to jail time -- but everyone believed that if you did tried it you'd be caught. On other hand, imagine a universe where the punishment was life in prison, but nobody believed anyone would ever get caught. Which universe has the most fraud?
I think we understand this with respect to our own behavior, and yet somehow when a problem like this comes up, we turn to "make the punishment worse" rather than "make the punishment certain." Because it's *easy* to make punishments more severe. It's hard to catch people, bring them to face justice, and successfully try them. But that's what we've got to do.
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Remember it's not just VW, it's a lot of car companies. This is the same as: benchmarks for GPUs optimising for certain demos, but not actually giving you better performance. But in this case it's actually illegal or at the least immoral what they were doing.
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I saw what you did there....
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Since VW cheated on NOx emissions (questionable whether that is actually a harmful pollutant) but performs quite well on particulates, I'm not sure which way the blame should go.
Evidently, the authors of the study were not sure either, flip-flopping from NOx to particulate claims. Diesels optimized for low particulate levels tend to produce more NOx and vice versa. But when one is writing sensationalist articles, I suppose it's important to cover all the buzzwords.
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To be fair, Volkswagen's diesels are on average the cleanest on the market and have been for some time.
For a given definition of shilling yeah I'm sure they are.
And that's only when being smog tested (Score:2)
Hate to say it... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to say it but so what? I tend to be on the left environmentally but that statistic is not compelling at all. Five thousand people out of the hundreds of millions in Europe die early deaths because of diesel emissions? Far more deaths can be attributed to all kinds of every day things then that.
I think significantly altering our atmosphere is a bad idea and I like clean air and all but that statistic isn't compelling in the least.
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If someone sold food products that killed 5000 people a year, not to mention all the others who didn't die but got sick, it would be a big deal.
That's what happened here. If they hadn't cheated on the emissions tests, 5000 people a year wouldn't die. Killing people through negligence is not acceptable, let alone killing them by deliberately cheating on safety tests.
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If someone sold food products that killed 5000 people a year...
Deaths from food-borne illness is 10 times that number.
Reducing it by an order of magnitude would be a big deal, but not in the way you seem to imply.
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Statistics stack, as do reasons for doing something. This by itself is no reason for concern, however it is just yet another thing in a list of reasons why we should be moving away from the ICE.
Just because there are children starving to death in Africa doesn't mean I'm not going to solve my personal hunger issue at dinner time.
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The problem is that (in the UK at least) only 14% of NOx comes from vehicles. The figures in the study show that the UK is broadly comparable to the rest of the EU in this regard.
So worrying about 5000 extra deaths from dieselgate is missing the point by some considerable margin. The big problem as I understand it is actually domestic gas boilers, which has been exacerbated by the switch to condensing boilers.
Basically the problem is if you maximize efficiency from burning *ANY* fuel, you need to increase t
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Exactly. My understanding is that diesels are 10%-20% more efficient (energy produced per unit of carbon burned).
True, but gasoline engines are getting better. http://www.popularmechanics.co... [popularmechanics.com]
If that's the case, 100 million diesel cars translates into 10-20 million gasoline cars NOT on the road in Europe (from the carbon emissions perspective). If you believe in anthropogenic global warming at all, that massive reduction in carbon emissions would greatly outweigh the cost to society
I'd like to see that calculation, please. I'd like to see your method of quantifying the costs to society.
of 5,000 presumably ill people dying slightly sooner than they would have due to NOx.
5,000 deaths per year. And your statement "presumably ill" people means: people with asthma and people who have the flu or pneumonia.
I actually think that people with asthma still deserve to live. "Let's kill them, they're presumably ill" is not acceptable reasoning to me.
You deserve software freedom in your car too. (Score:2)
Without agreeing to or objecting to the specific number of deaths per year attributable to cheating on environmental testing compliance, it would appear that Brad Kuhn (former Exec. Dir. of the Free Software Foundation, current Distinguished Technologist at the Software Freedom Conservancy) was right in his article "Software Freedom Doesn't Kill People, Your Security Through Obscurity Kills People [ebb.org]":
Diesel never was tought as "less poluting" (Score:3)
The real reason we have a lot of Diesel cars in Europe is because of taxes.
Gasoline is taxed more than diesel and cars tend to consume more. People are quick to do the maths and opt for the more economical solution, especially those who drive a lot.
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Most people severely underestimate just how much bigger your driving needs have to be, in order for diesel to actually make sense. Firstly, diesel engine cars tend to be significantly more expensive, and they usually require more expensive service, higher-grade engine oil, AdBlue for modern low-emission designs and other expenses compared to gasoline engine cars.
Secondly, diesel engines just don't work for short trips. They take longer to warm up to operating temperature, and until that happens, they pollut
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My 1982 300SD with OM617 does take a little while to warm up. But the 2006 Sprinter 2500 with OM647 warms up plenty fast, at least as quick as my 1998 A8 Quattro.
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The gauge probably moves to the "warm" position relatively quickly, but modern temperature gauges are basically just fancy-looking idiot lights. You should look at the actual oil temp sensor, which can be accessed through the OBD port.
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The gauge probably moves to the "warm" position relatively quickly, but modern temperature gauges are basically just fancy-looking idiot lights.
The gauge on my Audi is an idiot light, but it still shows you when you have come up to temp faithfully, the needle just won't move until you're already close to overheating. The gauge on the Sprinter appears to actually work correctly at all times; it's spectacularly unusual for diesel pickups (and vans) to have an idiot light temp gauge because it is common for people to actually run those vehicles near the limits of their capabilities. And in any case, they don't move to the warm position until the vehic
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The real reason ... is because ... Gasoline is taxed more than diesel...
And what reason, do you think, explains why governments reduced that tax on diesel?
(I'll give you a clue: incentivise behaviour you want to see more of.)
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And what reason, do you think, explains why governments reduced that tax on diesel?
The most convincing reason I've heard is that originally, it was a way for the government to tax personal cars more than trucks. Cars used gas and truck use diesel so that was an effective solution.
You see, personal cars are for a large part run with disposable income, where trucks are an essential part of the economy, which mean they can't tax them as much before being disruptive. Furthermore, long haul trucks have range that allows them to take advantage of lower prices in foreign countries, which creates
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The real reason we have a lot of Diesel cars in Europe is because of taxes.
Gasoline is taxed more than diesel and cars tend to consume more. People are quick to do the maths and opt for the more economical solution, especially those who drive a lot.
This, it's also mainly historical in many countries. Excise on diesel fuels in the UK is the same for petrol and diesel at 57.95 pence per litre.
Countries in Europe are slowly equalising petrol and diesel fuel taxes. The UK did years ago, the French are doing so this year, Germany is likely to follow. However over here people are still in the mindset that Diesel == cheap despite that not being the case any more. It will take some time for this to change but it will eventually change, the diesel passenger ca
What about Diesel trucks? (Score:2)
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You're completely full of shit about that claim.
The US has a TON of emission requirements on diesels. That includes commercial heavy trucks. In fact all new diesel engines have been modified in such a what they just won't run AT ALL on older style lower surfer diesel. It actually caused a real headache for about a year back in about '09 when they refineries in Memphis couldn't keep up production of the new fuel, and people couldn't get enough ultra low diesel that was safe to run in their new model of ca
Confused article - NOx != Microparticle (Score:2)
But according to Forbes it's actuallt 500K. (Score:2)
An older story from 500K, back when the US was in peak Climate Alarmisim.
http://fortune.com/2015/11/30/diesel-emissions-deaths-europe-ee/
At the end of the day the only thing that this latest study proves is that you can still literally make anything say anything with the right kind of half baked study. Especially when you take into account that a lot of EU nations use way more diesel powered personal vehicle than the US and other nation states or blocks do.
insignificant (Score:2)
The numbers mentioned here for diesel cars are nowhere near those.
Also the study fails to mention the benefits of diesel cars that outweigh insignificant death numbers.
5000 in Europe, that is over 742 million people or so. (see wikipedia)
With how many dieing from other things? smoking? bad diets? falling down the stairs? pills abuse? alcohol? cancer?
You get the idea.
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So, what's required to eliminate other sources of death? In this case, it looks like emission regulations that aren't cheated on would save 5K lives a year. Is it worth it?
I wonder (Score:2)
How many lives are saved per yer simply due to modern technology. Trucks bring products to build generating stations that provide electricity that allows for advanced research into medicines, fresh food available all the time, cars allow deathly ill people to reach hospitals in time before they die, refrigeration keeps people from getting sick, cell phones allow you to call for help when you're in danger, everything we take for granted as simple "creature comforts" are actually prolonging our lives. You kno
Illegal Migrants From Africa and Afghanistan (Score:2)
GOOD! Will solve the overpopulation problem (Score:2)
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Are, are contributing...
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Missed your latest cognitive therapy session, i see.
Effect not Clear (Score:2)
I doubt greatly that the emissions is contributing that much to the health of individuals.
All it says is "premature" death. What is not clear is by how much - shaving a day off the average life of 5,000 people is not that much statistically speaking. Shaving 10 years off is a lot. I also have to wonder that if diesel cars are having this much effect what is the effect of diesel lorries? These burn a lot more fuel than cars per kilometre and are driven far more too. If the effect of lorries is to cause the premature deaths of 50,000 people by whatever standard they are using then we should not b
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Larger trucks are subject to stricter standards in Europe. They're required to have electrical heating on the exhaust system so the AdBlue NOX suppression system can function regardless of ambient temperature. Passenger cars are exempt from this, and they're allowed to disable the AdBlue system if the ambient temperature is too low for it to be effective (as high as 15 degrees for some Mercedes cars IIRC). The VW cars implicated in the scandal completely lacked AdBlue NOX suppression for the most part, b
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Yeah, all deaths worth doing anything about are premature deaths, since the death rate over history is about 93%, and we have reason to suspect that everybody now alive will die.
However, if it's just a matter of better enforcement of existing regulation saving 5K lives, it may well be worth it to do. No matter what, knowing the number of lives ended prematurely is useful for planning.
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Just look at smoking-related deaths and you see that the diesel figures are no more than marginal noise.
War on Diesel (Score:2)
Or all [slashdot.org] those resulting from the government-imposed "War on Fat" [time.com]... Why, shouldn't it be criminal to even produce the murderous butter, much less offer it to children [nydailynews.com]?
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What is the basis for your doubt? I find it interesting that you cite your personal doubt as if it actually proves something.
Doubt doesn't prove anything. You find people who doubt literally anything. There are people who doubt the moon landing was real, or that the Earth is spherical. And what sustains them is that they find other people who have the same doubts, and they take that somehow as confirmation.
Re: Ha, yeah right. (Score:1)
Illegal aliens are killing more tham 5000 people per year? What are you smoking?
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Far left? No, more like weenie corporate all-things-to-all-people PC left. SV companies will pride themselves on their transgender bathrooms while censoring viewpoints they consider "radical" from their parts of the Internet.
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>> "Far left, politically."
>
> Only to someone on the far right. See how this works?
No. It's BULLSHIT.
I used to consider myself center-left and I agree with the OP.
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> Socialists are left, communists are far left.
The only difference between those two is the matter of degree and whether or not you think that somehow big government will eventually lead to a libertarian paradise.
Either one still leads you to living with your parents because there is a shortage of housing.
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And you're prepared to lie about conditions in Europe to suit your ideology. Right.
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>>he thinks the US is anywhere other than far right on the spectrum
>
> enjoy your for-profit healthcare. im sure you matter almost as much as their profits. keke
Profit means that there are people lining up to sell to me. That means a wide array of excellent options. It doesn't matter if it's housing, lattes or hospitals.
I benefit greatly from this as an actual patient. I wouldn't trade my land of plenty in for any free garbage anywhere else.
Government doesn't set prices and government control sup
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Actually, it works out poorly. The US pays far more for medical care per capita than literally any other country on the planet, and it's nowhere near close. The difference between 2014 US per capita medical costs and the runner-up Swiss per capita medical costs comes to a little under a trillion dollars a year that the US would save if it only had the second most expensive medical care on the planet.
You can also look at public health measures, and see that the US doesn't do very well compared to other
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> Doesn't matter, these myths are about scary foreigners. The details are irrelevant.
These details are VERY relevant. There are subtle distinctions between INDIVIDUALS. The individual needs to be judged based on their own circumstances and behavior.
The distinctions do matter. They aren't all just "immigrants". That's just liberals trying to cloud the issue.
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Tabloid journalism? It's the liberal media that distorts this stuff. They will take a criminal and pretend the person is just an innocent slob trying to make a living.
Illegal aliens are just the undocumented. They could be harmless.
The real distinction is criminal aliens where they have made it clear that they aren't just here to "pursue the dream".
Criminal aliens have been the priority during the current US administration as it was in the previous one. Within those people, certain crimes are spelled out as
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The biggest factor should be that technology and industries move a lot faster than bureaucrats. By the time laws get passed, what they're trying to regulate has already changed.
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I know it's Europe and European bureaucrats involved, but maybe they should just stop with all of these artificially-imposed economic distortions and just let the free market make decisions like this. The free market is much better at properly allocating resources than bureaucrats could ever hope to be.
I wish that libertarians would, someday, take the trouble to learn some real economics. Maybe take an introductory course in it, why not. Economics is actually a very interesting field, but just blindly saying "the free market solves everything and has no problems" isn't really economics. Even Adam Smith pointed out the problems as well as the advantages of free markets, and he was writing well over two hundred years ago, before economics really even existed.
A free market is good at allocating some resou
Learn some economics, why not. (Score:2)
I wish that libertarians would, someday, take the trouble to learn some real economics. Maybe take an introductory course in it, why not.
For completeness, I should add that I also wish that conservatives and liberals would take the trouble to learn some real economics.
Ignoring economics when it's inconvenient is a feature of pretty much all political ideologies, not just libertarians. (It's just more annoying with libertarians, because their ignorance is so jarringly at odds with their rhetoric.)
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Why did you reply to me instead of the parent, which you quoted?
Forking comments [Re:Stop with the economic...] (Score:2)
I was replying to both the parent (first comment) and also your comment on it (second comment).
I did assume that slashdotters recognize the doubled quote-bar to show when it is the grandparent being quoted and commented on, and the single quote bar showing that it is the immediately preceding comment being quoted and commented on. Possibly some newer slashdotters in fact don't understand the quote protocol, but they can glance upward to see who said what.
I suppose I could have made two separate comments,
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study : http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-ve... [ucsusa.org]
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Electrical motors are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, and there are ways of generating electricity that don't involve coal.
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If all of the propaganda about solar being cheap is not total bullshit, then the market again will sort all of this out. Daddy Warbucks doesn't want to pay more for something than he has to. He's no different than anyone else in this. If anything he is MORE pragmatic and not prone to conspicuous consumption nonsense.
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The free market is much better at properly allocating resources than bureaucrats could ever hope to be
Interesting. In the age of machine learning and Big Data, is that assertion valid?
The way that Uber, Amazon and Facebook work (other examples exist) suggests to me that while free markets yield better results than 1950s central planning, the central planning of this decade and the next one can be even better!
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cars do use it
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And then you look at the following:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/... [europa.eu]
That makes the diesel exhaust problem marginal.
Re: Suck it meatbags! (Score:4, Informative)
In November the EEA reported that air pollution is causing 467,000 premature deaths in the EU, which would put it in the same league as smoking. The 5,000 figure quoted is additional deaths just caused by the misreported dieselgate vehicles; diesel as a whole expected to contribute twice that many to the total.
Meta-analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there anything more useless than a Meta-analysis?
How many times have eggs been bad for you, then good again?
Butter?
Fats?
Etc?
Brought to you by Meta-analysis.
Re: Meta-analysis (Score:2)
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And then you look at the following:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/... [europa.eu]
That makes the diesel exhaust problem marginal.
No, it merely confirms that tobacco, diesel engines, alcohol, food additives, and addictive painkillers are all legal because death is necessary and by design, backed by government policy and regulation.
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And then you look at the following:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/... [europa.eu]
That makes the diesel exhaust problem marginal.
I see, Well then following your logic, we shouldn't have any pollution controls on diesel engines because smokers.
Oh - wait - that's just rephrasing what you wrote. My bad.
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And really kill the economy of the world at the same time. Time to breed horses!
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Tobacco taxes are not to raise money for general revenue. They discourage smoking and provide some revenue to pay for what the smoke does. Gasoline and diesel fuel taxes are not in the same category, since people have to use them or the economy collapses.
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Everything goes into the general pool one way or another, but different taxes have different purposes. Carbon taxes would be used to correct for serious market externalities. What we were discussing is whether the purpose behind tobacco taxes would be considered successful based on people quitting smoking or money taken in, which are obviously incompatible.
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There is still no proof of second hand cigarette smoke causing a single death (unsubstantiated unscientific claims but why should science matter?) but the freedom of choice brigade is there to tell you what to do in all public space. Now shut up and inhale this diesel exhaust. Bah!
Oh hell, the smoking fascists are on to 3rd hand smoke by now. People have to hate something, I guess.I suspect many of the people who believe this also believe in crystal resonances and astral projection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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> There is still no proof of second hand cigarette smoke
Sure. Because smoke in general is just SO HARMLESS. You have to be fucking kidding me. Even in the 15th century they were bright enough to realize that smoking was inherently dangerous.
Cigarette smoke contains nasty industrial pollutants.
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The native americans, who introduced smoking to Europeans, held that abusing tobacco was a taboo over at least 1,000 years earlier, but probably longer.
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What you mean is that there is not a single death that can be positively attributed to second-hand smoke. This is true of first-hand smoke as well. It's largely statistical, and based on health studies of people who share quarters with smokers, as well as what we know the crap in second-hand smoke can do.
There's lots of things in public health that have to be statistical, because not everything that kills kills immediately al
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If you don't want second hand smoke, stay out of the buildings where smokers smoke. Why must you ban smoking in ALL private businesses?
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> If you don't want second hand smoke, stay out of the buildings where smokers smoke. Why must you ban smoking in ALL private businesses?
It will be like binding arbitration clauses in contracts or businesses that don't allow blacks or gays. Good luck finding some place where you don't have to risk your health just to work or shop.
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In the US, this is state by state. In my state, buildings that aren't residences are non-smoking.
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What if the employees all smoke? What if the employers specifically hire smokers just to allow smoking in the business?
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> If you don't want second hand smoke, stay out of the buildings where smokers smoke. Why must you ban smoking in ALL private businesses?
It will be like binding arbitration clauses in contracts or businesses that don't allow blacks or gays.
I didn't know that "non-smokers" was a protected class.
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> So because people smoke we can't look at any other respiratory irritants? Great logic, you should be a politician.
No. You should be. You want us to get into a fit of hysterics over a number that is obviously small. From a mathematical and engineering perspective, this is assinine.
No. You're the one that should be the politician.
You can subject everyone to nonsense that's highly disruptive and expensive for no other reason than "good intentions".
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Is anyone talking about getting into a fit of hysterics here? It's useful to know what's killing people, even if it isn't the biggest killer.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You, sir, are the problem here.
The cars "passed the test". How much of your science syllabus do you remember after the final exam? The politicians only asked them to pass the exam, not to meet the requirements on the road. being good Germans, they "Obeyed the law".
In reality, the problem is not 1.6 litre Volkswagens its the laws. If you want cars not to pollute
Re: (Score:2)
They did not "obey the law, being good Germans." They cheated on the tests. Period.
If you want cars not to pollute on the road, pass a law that says "don't pollute on the road".
Gosh, so simple!
Uh, how do you check whether cars "don't pollute on the road" to know if they're breaking that law? Oh, wait, yes-- that's obvious: you check that by testing the cars.
Which is exactly what the laws did.