smoking with children in cars

[Sea Skimmer]

So when will California also issue 100 dollar tickets for parents who fail to provide their child with as gas mask to protect against the absurdly greater quantity of pollution spewing out of California’s millions of bumper to bumper logjammed cars? Heck lets just make it a 200 dollar ticket which also gives the driver the option of instead purchasing a nice blower equipped child gas hood which is about the same price.

[Darth Wong]

So when will California also issue 100 dollar tickets for parents who fail to provide their child with as gas mask to protect against the absurdly greater quantity of pollution spewing out of California’s millions of bumper to bumper logjammed cars? Heck lets just make it a 200 dollar ticket which also gives the driver the option of instead purchasing a nice blower equipped child gas hood which is about the same price.

You have some empirical evidence to support your assertion that carcinogen concentrations inside a car from pollution outside the car are "absurdly greater" than concentrations from someone smoking inside that same car?

[Adrian Laguna]

It's a red herring in any case. Even if air pollution in traffic is comparable to cigarette smoke, adding cigarette smoke on top of it isn't helping the child's health.

[Napoleon the Clown]

California air quality isn't exactly brilliant, but I saw plenty of asthmatics walking about just fine in the open air without any sort of filtration systems in place. Compare that to when a lot of people with asthma walk through a room filled with cigarette smoke. And, of course, the quantity of air compared to the amount of carcinogens and other irritants released by each. I somehow doubt that cigarettes fair better, seeing as how much greater a volume of air car exhaust has to spread about. And the constantly improving filtration on the exhaust coming from the cars. Cigarettes only filter what goes into the smoker's lungs while s/he takes a drag. The smoke that comes off the end is completely unfiltered.

[Sea Skimmer]

You have some empirical evidence to support your assertion that carcinogen concentrations inside a car from pollution outside the car are "absurdly greater" than concentrations from someone smoking inside that same car?

http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/report ... report.pdf

Concentrations don’t have to be equal for equal or greater risk, because car pollution is overwhelmingly more voluminous, and you breath the pollution of every car ahead of you for a considerable distance. Each gallon of gas burned in a car is turning 10,000 gallons of air into pollution weighing nearly 100 pounds. I’ve never heard of visible city blanketing smog forming from cigarette smoke, and yet despite having led the world in air quality standards since 1959 California still has a huge smog problem, its actually been getting worse recently.

Also, according to that file, the pollution inside a car from auto emissions is typically WORSE then the outside air, but that makes perfect sense.

By law in the state a passenger car can emit .6 grams of oxides of nitrogen per mile and still be legal, the federal limit is twice as high. But to make things even better it’s just recently been discovered that ultrafine particles (mostly this is metals suspended within the gasoline) are actually the single most toxic form of automotive emissions. These ultrafine emissions have gone way up recently in attempts to reduce other more obvious forms of emissions, because higher combustion tempatures are burning fine particals into smaller ones. The resulting ultrafine particles are totally unregulated and are not tested for via tailpipe sniffers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/369169.stm

Now for a more direct look at deaths from car pollution, this report suggests auto emissions killed 21,000 people in a year in France-Austria-Switzerland. The combined population of those nations is greater then that of California, but not overwhelmingly so, and more importantly they drive far less per capita and have less air pollution in general since they burn much less coal for electrical power. Second hand smoke meanwhile kills around 55,000 (this I a median estimate, statistics vary considerably on the matter) people per year across the entire 300 million person US, suggesting that car pollution does in fact work out to be a much greater danger.

[Darth Wong]

You have some empirical evidence to support your assertion that carcinogen concentrations inside a car from pollution outside the car are "absurdly greater" than concentrations from someone smoking inside that same car?

http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/report ... report.pdf

Concentrations don’t have to be equal for equal or greater risk, because car pollution is overwhelmingly more voluminous, and you breath the pollution of every car ahead of you for a considerable distance. Each gallon of gas burned in a car is turning 10,000 gallons of air into pollution weighing nearly 100 pounds. I’ve never heard of visible city blanketing smog forming from cigarette smoke, and yet despite having led the world in air quality standards since 1959 California still has a huge smog problem, its actually been getting worse recently.

Also, according to that file, the pollution inside a car from auto emissions is typically WORSE then the outside air, but that makes perfect sense.

By law in the state a passenger car can emit .6 grams of oxides of nitrogen per mile and still be legal, the federal limit is twice as high. But to make things even better it’s just recently been discovered that ultrafine particles (mostly this is metals suspended within the gasoline) are actually the single most toxic form of automotive emissions. These ultrafine emissions have gone way up recently in attempts to reduce other more obvious forms of emissions, because higher combustion tempatures are burning fine particals into smaller ones. The resulting ultrafine particles are totally unregulated and are not tested for via tailpipe sniffers.

That report claims that 100,000 premature deaths in America are caused each year by vehicle pollution. Compare this to the 400,000 premature deaths every year attributed to cigarettes, even leaving aside the fact that vehicle pollution affects virtually 100% of the population while cigarettes only affect smokers and those close to them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/369169.stm

Now for a more direct look at deaths from car pollution, this report suggests auto emissions killed 21,000 people in a year in France-Austria-Switzerland. The combined population of those nations is greater then that of California, but not overwhelmingly so, and more importantly they drive far less per capita and have less air pollution in general since they burn much less coal for electrical power. Second hand smoke meanwhile kills around 55,000 (this I a median estimate, statistics vary considerably on the matter) people per year across the entire 300 million person US, suggesting that car pollution does in fact work out to be a much greater danger.

Your math is shit. The population of France is approximately 64 million, and the populations of Austria and Switzerland are approximately 8 million each, for a total of 80 million. That seems "overwhelmingly" larger than California to me. That is, in factmore than a quarter of the population of the US. So we end up with a figure of around 80,000. Even if we disregard first-hand smoke and only look at second-hand smoke, you are again ignoring the fact that heavy second-hand smoke exposure affects far fewer people than vehicle emissions do. Your conclusion (that vehicle pollutants are "absurdly greater") is still completely unjustifiable.

[Kanastrous]

you breath the pollution of every car ahead of you for a considerable distance.

Even when traffic is stopped, and the wind is at your back?