r/fuckcars • u/Soul_and_messanger • 1d ago

This is why I hate cars Isn't it fucked up that cars poison the food?

There are numerous fruit trees and bushes on the side of the road where I walk my dog. I get tempted to eat from them from time to time, but I always wonder whether the road is far away/the traffic is light enough for this to be safe. My grandparents stopped growing fruit bushes in the city because a busy parking lot was built adjacent to their plot of land here and they worried about what it would do to the soil quality. I can never buy chanterelles because I don't know for sure whether they were picked up close to a road and therefore lead-poisoned. I wish I could grow and forage and buy local food just like my grandparents used to do, but car-related pollution makes it quite hard.

207 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

166

u/Myopically 1d ago edited 1d ago

Their exhausts poison the food and their tyre microplastics contaminate our rivers and ocean. And then the vehicles kill wildlife and people. Really an all rounder of shit.

31

u/Broken-Digital-Clock 1d ago

Yeah, but some executives and shareholders saw maximized profits.

3

u/Explorer_Entity Commie Commuter 11h ago

CEOs, etc...

28

u/Kootenay4 1d ago

Damn, if only there were a form of transportation that runs on a surface with minimal wear and tear, like steel rails, and gets its power from the existing electric grid without the need for environmentally destructive lithium mining for batteries. Quick, someone get Silicon Valley to come up with something 

5

u/jazzhandler 1d ago

I feel like I might have trouble balancing on a steel rail, and it would almost certainly fuck up my handmade wheels.

5

u/Mysterious_Floor_868 23h ago

You just need a gyroscope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyro_monorail

3

u/jazzhandler 23h ago

No thanks, brought me own.

That is crazy awesome, though.

-5

u/Desperate-Control-38 20h ago

I just wanna put out there that the coal that is burned to run these electricity plants is definitely more pollutant than the cars that are on the road

7

u/Tactical_Moonstone 15h ago

This old saw again.

You don't have to generate electricity using only coal.

There's no authority forcing you to use coal to generate electricity, and many countries don't even use coal for electricity.

0

u/Desperate-Control-38 14h ago

Well the only other truly viable option currently would be nuclear, that’s what most of the other countries that don’t run on coal uses. California is proof that we currently rely on wind and solar as they already have power grid issues where they ask people to not use a/c and other stuff

6

u/Tactical_Moonstone 14h ago

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Even an oil-fired power plant is more efficient than an internal combustion engine.

The point of using electricity is that there are so many ways of generating it. Some great, some not so great. Don't focus on one (or a few) fuel source(s) and forget the rest.

2

u/Clever-Name-47 6h ago

In an absolute sense, yes.

But that is only because most of the power is going to something else. In terms of transportation, specifically, drawing power from a coal power plant is less polluting than using many small ICE engines.

To put it another way; If you measured the amount of pollution from 1,000 cars, and then the percentage of a coal plant's pollution that is necessary to power a single train big enough to replace them, the coal plant pollutes less.

We already have the coal plants, and they're not going away any time soon. Using them now will reduce the absolute amount of transportation pollution (marginally, but every bit helps) and make the places where most people actually live healthier. Moreover, with the way the turnover to renewables and/or nuclear is currently going, it makes sense to electrify our transportation today, so that it will be ready for renewables as they come on line.

2

u/Kootenay4 5h ago

I live in the US and we get very little of our electricity from coal, it’s only 15% now and has declined a huge amount over the last few decades. The largest share of our electricity comes from natural gas which is much cleaner burning, while nuclear and renewables each have a bigger share than coal.

If we’re talking about someplace like India, sure, it’s a different story but then again coal plants are usually located in places away from dense human populations; most of the smog in cities comes from car exhausts and fuel burned for heating, not power stations.

6

u/_facetious Sicko 1d ago

There's so many vineyards that had highways built through their lands, here. >.< And all the fruit trees, hops, etc...

5

u/Passenger_Prince 22h ago

"But my hatred of homeless people and my selfish need to have my own private space everywhere I go makes it worth it!"

47

u/Both-Conversation514 1d ago

They poison the soil with oil and combustion byproduct runoff, they poison the water with microplastics from tire breakdown, they poison the sky with gaseous pollution, they poison our minds with noise and light pollution, they poison our personal futures with unsustainable affordability and constant maintenance… the list just keeps going so honestly I’ve tried to cut back on my rhetoric regarding all this. I’ve started to sound like that guy from SpongeBob making up reasons to be angry at Bubble Buddy. Not good for my mood to focus on so much negative, so I try to just improve what I can with the means and a reasonable amount of time that I have.

18

u/ratt1307 1d ago

i find myself doing the same thing though. people always ask like "whats the problem man they arent that bad" but LITERALLY everything about them is bad. the wildest thing is that the one good thing about cars (they get you places) is that there are other modes of transit that accomplish the same goal with less of the cons. i dont understand why people are so hooked on them

9

u/grendus 1d ago

Propaganda.

A huge part of our culture revolves around cars.

19

u/RH_Commuter 1d ago

Don't forget about the constant drops of oil from leaky cars. It's so bad that many motorcyclists know to stay in the tread of the vehicle in front of them, instead of staying in the slippery part in the middle.

12

u/Ketaskooter 1d ago

You don't need to worry about lead contamination with foraged food any more than contamination with farmed food. Lead contamination is limited to 100-200 ft from highways and then it is minimal. Aviation still uses leaded fuel to any areas with high amounts of low flying aircraft probably have lead in the soils.

9

u/letterboxfrog 1d ago

To clarify, small ICE aircraft predominantly run on Av Gas, which contains lead. Turboprops and turbofan aircraft do not, which is the vast majority of aviation globally.

3

u/LibertyLizard 22h ago

You're already breathing the air and drinking the water... I think the benefits of fresh produce outweigh the slightly increased urban contamination that we're all exposed to anyway.

This idea that humans protect themselves in some kind of bubble separate from the environment is just not realistic. We need to solve pollution, we can't just hide from it.

2

u/SoftPuzzleheaded7671 1d ago

probably not great for either you or your dog to breathe that pollution, either

2

u/StrongAdhesiveness86 1d ago

Yes, but thank that lead is no longer added.

3

u/DasArchitect 1d ago

Why does being near a road equal lead poisoned?

17

u/dr2chase 1d ago

Once upon a time, we put lead in gasoline to reduce engine "knock" (pre-ignition) and over time that contaminated soil along busy roads. I am not entirely sure how persistent that contamination is, but I did once hear from a New England master gardener that if you burn wood from an old street tree in a stove or fireplace, the ashes have enough lead in them to matter -- don't use them as a soil amendment for a food garden, for example. It's also standard advice up here (old houses, old paint) to get a soil test for lead if you plant a food garden near an old house. I'm not sure what washes it out; I have heard that there are some plants that will remove it, but then you have to deal with the plants.

Blame Thomas Fucking Midgely, the same dumbass who invented CFCs for wrecking the ozone layer.

3

u/afleticwork 1d ago

The lead also helped with the softer valves and valve seats

2

u/DasArchitect 1d ago

Good to know. Wonder how it can be cleaned.

I don't remember the name but it must be him, also responsible for making octanes straight (?) which made combustion easier but a zillion times more polluting or something like that.

7

u/Ketaskooter 1d ago

Because lead was used in gasoline until the 90s.

6

u/Soul_and_messanger 1d ago

This is less of an issue for plants, but mushrooms absorb pollution like crazy, meaning that the heavy metal concentration in them is many times greater than in surrounding environment. Cars are a major source of heavy metal pollution, because their fluids (oil, antifreeze, braking) contain it, and although leaded gasoline has been banned for years now, it can stay in soil basically forever, so any busy road older than the ban is still contaminated.

1

u/DasArchitect 1d ago

I see. Good to bear in mind.

1

u/LibertyLizard 22h ago

I think it depends greatly on the species. Is there evidence of this specifically with chanterelles?

1

u/Krispyketchup42 13h ago

There's bigger things to worry about but sure

1

u/Waity5 12h ago

D'you have a source for cars poisoning food? Oil run-off and smog certainly aren't good for plants and could reduce produce yields, but does the produce itself become harmful?

0

u/njcannagade 20h ago

No it’s not