There isn’t much that people can do unless car drivers realize how polluting their cars are. Any rule will be seen as some obstacle to freedom and lobbied into irrelevance—unless people wake up and look at their exhaust pipe differently.

I don’t know how to do it. It’s such a violent dissonance that bridging it will be hard: people know that if they are in a room with their car while it runs, they will die within minutes. This is a trope used without explanation in popular movies and TV series. Having someone stand near the same exhaust affects their health because they breathe a comparable dose. If you tell the same driver, they will curse you loudly. They will openly prefer their convenience over something they know intuitively is deadly.

That dissonance kills more people than anything else—besides eating fatty food and not exercising when you have a heart problem. It kills more young people than anything else. It kills more people than other car-related dissonances (1. most drivers think they are far better than others and drive dangerously, or 2. parents think having a tall hood that hides the children standing in front of your car is somehow protective of your children).

I’m not sure why psychologists don’t investigate those three problems more. The yearly deaths alone are staggering.

Unless car lobbyists suddenly lose their complete control of the media and car advertisers stop lying about how cars are used, no progress will happen in that domain. VW is trading after lying about killing millions of people with their diesel cheating device… The company is actually doing fine. What other group, what army could kill so many people and be welcome in polite society!?

I suggested to a local group fighting pollution in a small, time-limited area (a school pick-up) that drivers buy plastic bags to capture their exhaust gases. In that plan, organisers would also offer to treat the bag's contents for a fee.

That was to give people a sense of the scale of the pollution, not even the toxicity. How massive is the cloud of exhaust? It’s straightforward to compute the amount: RPM * engine volume.

That was a conversation with people who were openly complaining that kids were sick because parents didn’t cut their engine while waiting. I couldn’t imagine a softer, more on-board target. They refused.

No problem in human psychology is so deadly, and yet so frustrating to address…