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Because its a problem which affects the environment, not the consumer. You could buy an electric car and it wouldn't help one bit. You'd have to get everyone to buy one.

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It's a problem of external effects. Now if we would make an effort to attribute the costs of these external effects to their originator, internal combustion engines would be wholly unavailable to anyone under 1M$ net worth almost instantly. We don't do so because a) it takes effort (and thereby generates costs all in itself) and b) we usually don't care about the plight of future generations and those around us and c) we want the economy not to crash.

And we don't even know about all the external effects that gasoline cars have; there was this article in Mother Jones [1] recently that correlated leaded gas to the crime rate, owing to the detrimental effects lead has on the human brain.

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

Have you ever sat in traffic? I used to commute in Houston and even with a fairly decent filter on the A/C it stunk.

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