Modern cars should be equipped with a catalysator, making the majority of pollution to be Co2, worsening the global warming.

To some extent heavy metals are being distributed in the air by the wheels in heavily populated areas.

This can be greatly improved by limiting traffic in heavily populated areas. Trump removed such a rule from New York City recently for reasons I can not comprehend.

Many european cities have improved air quality successfully and hence increased life expectancy by limiting car traffic.

The majority of air pollution of particles however, is caused by the industry (the companies making those cars, among others).

In fact, you are a worse polluter of the earth today if you buy a new Tesla than if you kept driving your 1980s gasoline car due to the amount of pollution created by producing a single vehicle.

I know no one's ever going to change their ways cause of the increasingly evident ravages of climate change but I swear I feel like throwing rocks at the big SUVs rolling by with exactly one person in them during the heat domes here in NYC.

Just, so, gross.

And it truly is the _vast majority_ of cars going by with exactly one person in them. So wasteful, so much pollution, so hot... frustrating.

Ohh it's definitely cars.

In more ways than one. A lot of "poor" countries have life expectancies comparable to the US. The big difference is they don't have a culture of every single person needing to own a car that spray carcinogens all over the place.

Obesity, which is its own massive wrecking ball, is also significantly lower in these "poor" countries.

The arrogance of laughing at poor people riding bikes to work when that would create a drastically healthier society.

Imagine if you had a 4km x 4km city with no consumer vehicles ( emergency and delivery exempt). Just walking paths and bike lanes. The people living there would be drastically healthier.

Or hell, it might just be luck. A lot of smokers live until there 80s enjoying a fat cigar once a day

I think people underestimate the impact of air pollution because it's so easy to get desensitized to it. Try wearing a respirator with good seal and filter in an urban area for 10 minutes or so. When you take it off you'll probably smell vehicle exhaust you didn't notice before. Human sense of smell tends to tune out constant low level background odors, but they can still be a sign of something harmful.

I think you grossly underestimate the degree to which cars (and industry that we had yet to kick out to China) were dirtier decades ago than they are today.

We're talking like literal orders, plural, of magnitude when comparing between the generally no cats automotive fleet of the 70s with anything since the advent of both cats and computerized fuel injection. Any old timer can tell you of the smog that used to be frequent in urban areas. These days it's mostly gone, at least when California or Canada (depending on where you live) isn't on fire.

(INB4 people who are a net negative to public discourse construe this comment as some sort of endorsement for everyone driving everywhere all the time)

Did jump the paywall — and FTA, regardless, the question remains what causes these non-smoker lung cancers. Issues of environment and heredity are discussed.

not in the US: https://www.cdc.gov/united-states-cancer-statistics/publicat...

I bought an Airthings radon monitor because of that stat, and one thing that I have learned is that those mitigation systems do not necessarily work. I have a system that works, but initially, even though my house had a system, it did not reliably keep the radon levels below the federal action level.

Barometric pressure, temperature, and HVAC all seem to have some bearing - tightening the house for air leaks actually did a lot of good in keeping levels low. Also, sump pump failures or ground water levels can "push" radon into the house. I dug a deeper sump pit and also put a secondary radon fan to pull air out of my sub-foundation drain pipes to ensure the air below the house is cycled.

Still, in Boulder County, my house will fail its radon test after a 2 hour power outage.

I am an evangelist for continuous radon monitoring, alerts and tests.

I bought a house in the hills of Los Angeles and we tested for radon. Turned out it was very high, and LA is one of the few places in California that has high radon. We got it mitigated, and it wasn't that expensive. I talked to neighbors and real estate agents, and no one wanted to know anything about it. I was shocked. Everyone is pulling the wool over their own eyes here.

On the surface, the data from the American Lung Association appears to support that hypothesis...

https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/lung-ca...

Yes, also, the base rate of smoking in different groups is important to take into consideration to prevent the base rate fallacy.

Very few Chinese American women smoke (~2%), so if smokers and non-smokers have the same chance of getting lung cancer not caused by smoking, then the number of non-smokers with lung cancer will be a larger proportion.

If 100% of some group would be non-smokers, then obviously 100% of lung cancer cases in that group will be in non-smokers.

It's similar to misinterpreting the fact that most people that were hospitalized from Covid-19 were vaccinated.

I was just talking to my wife about playgrounds using shredded tires as the "mulch". I don't know where the rubber comes from, if and how it is cleaned, or what particulate material it carries, but it seems dubious at best.

Man, similar story. Spent a few months next to a mall parking lot with rough asphalt. Apparently the neighborhood had a car drifting crowd, and they'd regularly do so, which made me irrationally angry.

I only realized later that all the black dust everywhere must have been tire particles, when I realized other places DON'T have the black dust. Given the toxicity of tire pollution, it doesn't seem like my reaction was irrational after all. Sucks for all the people that still live there, who may not even realize what's going on.

This might actually be brake dust. In that case, the situation most likely will be improved by electric cars because they use their brakes far less often, decelerating with their motors.

The lungs are exposed to air, but they're also exposed to a lot of bloodborne compounds, since a full vascular cycle goes through the pulmonary arteries.

The null hypothesis is "it's something in the air", but with the increase in non-lung cancers in young people[1] noted over the past decade, it's entirely possible it's something else, and lung tissue is one of the susceptible ones to whatever it is.

[1] https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2025...

Wok cooking is done at really high temp, which releases gases that are not present in moderate/low temp cooking. Woks trends asian, cooking trends towards women.

smokers thirds FYI: - one third dies a direct smoking related death - one third suffers from smoking related diseases then dies - one third dies of something else, younger than the other two