Cars are an important and integral part of human society today. They take us from place to place, home to work, work to home, from wherever to wherever. They are, however, much more than metal boxes used as an appliance to perform a task. Unlike a toaster, many people have a relationship to the metal boxes that we call cars. People give their cars name, wash them regularly, and almost think of them as living organisms. People get sad and emotional when they are sold and miss them when they are gone. They are one of the few things that almost the entirety of the U.S., and just about the whole world, have in common. While rich business men may get driven about in their quarter of a million dollars Mercedes, the less endowed person can drive their five hundred buck junkyard beater. 

If cars had feelings, would they feel the same love for us as we have for them? Possibly, but cars are an insidious threat to us organic life forms. At the same time that we are driving around in our beloved vehicles, they are spewing toxic chemicals out of their tailpipe. They are smiling in our face and stabbing us in the back at the same time. It is common knowledge that cars emit carbon dioxide (CO2) during the combustion of gasoline or diesel, which is the action of the engine running. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which means that when a car spits it out of the tailpipe, some of the gas can make it up into the atmosphere where it will trap in more of the sun’s radiation, or heat, than the atmosphere would have normally. This trapping of heat is called the greenhouse effect, just like greenhouses trap in heat allowing plants to continue to grow in a warm climate even when the outside temperature wouldn’t allow plant growth. Unlike in actual greenhouses, global warming is not beneficial to the world and the environment. It is the cause of the melting of the polar ice caps where cute and cuddly polar bears and penguins live. This is not only terrible for the life forms that survive on the ice, but melting the ice caps causes global sea levels to rise. Many places in Asian and Oceania are in danger of sinking below the waves in the upcoming decades if sea levels rise as scientist believe they will.

CO2, and other emissions from cars, also contributes to the smog that fills many cities air.  This has led to cities, such as Mexico City, Paris, Athens, and Madrid, to start banning cars from parts of their cities. The positive impact of the banning of cars from small parts of the city have led these cities to plan for the eventual banning of all cars from the city in its entirety.

While CO2 and smog are contributing factors to why these cities have started to ban cars, there is an even more dangerous chemical that is produced when cars engines run. This chemical called nitrous oxide has many forms so it is usually revered to as nitrous oxides, or NOx. The x in NOx is a variable that changes depending on how many oxygens are attached to the central nitrogen atom. Regardless of the number of oxygens a molecule of nitrous oxide has, it is a known carcinogen, just like tobacco smoke or asbestos. 

Nitrous oxides are especially prevalent in the emissions caused by the burning of diesel fuel. Diesel fuel is another hydrocarbon that is refined from petroleum oil, just like gasoline. The petroleum is distilled in an oil refinery and the process is very similar to the distillation of alcohol for making hard alcohols, such as the numerous whiskeys and vodka and others. Alcohol itself is a hydrocarbon that can also be used to power cars. It goes by another name, ethanol, and up to ten percent of the gas you get at the gas station can be ethanol. During the distillation of petroleum, different chains or hydrocarbons, or the molecules that primarily make up the carbon based fuels that are used today, rise and boil at different rates than other lengths of hydrocarbons.

Heavier chains of hydrocarbons boil at a higher temperature and aren’t able to rise very high in the column of the distillery, so they can be separated from the light chains. Diesel is made of heavier carbon chains than gasoline, which gives a volume of diesel more energy than the same volume of gasoline, which is why cars that run on diesel get much better gas mileage than gasoline cars. Because it is heavier and therefore distilled at a higher temperature than gasoline, more contaminates are able to be distilled with diesel, which makes it a dirtier fuel than gasoline. Some of these contaminates contain nitrogen, and when they are combusted alongside diesel, they create the dangerous NOx molecules. This is the reason it is possible to smell diesel fumes when around a diesel car that is running. The contaminates are also why large diesel trucks have to add diesel exhaust fluid, or DEF, to a fill cap next to the diesel filler cap. DEF contains urea, and when combusted alongside the NOx containing chemicals, it neutralizes the NOx and changes it to a less dangerous substance known as ammonia. Ammonia is a base that is relatively safe and can be found in everyday cleaning supplies such as Windex.

Although it is a dirtier fuel than gasoline, diesel’s increased mileage is why many cities and countries in Europe pushed their citizens to start to buy and drive diesel cars twenty or so years ago. Europe has always had less access to petroleum products, such as gasoline, which is why the cost of gasoline is much higher there than in America. The U.S.  has the ability to produce its own fossil fuels, and it can supplement its supply of fuel from places such as South America and the Middle East easier than Europe can. This need for oil from the Middle East is a contributing factor to why the U.S. got involved with wars in the Middle East; they threatened to disrupt the amount of oil the U.S. imported from countries like Saudi Arabia. 

Europe’s higher gas prices caused its citizens to switch to diesel fuel, and their countries and cities were glad they did because burning diesel fuel produces less CO2 than gasoline. Carbon Dioxide emissions were the hot topic back in the nineties when these cities started to advocate for diesels. This is now starting to change as they are now having to start banning diesel cars due to the NOx they emit. This NOx has been shown in lab mice that it can cause numerous tumors in the lungs of the mice in as little as six months. Six months is a very short time in the grand scheme of things, so if it only takes that long for mice to develop it, NOx must be a very dangerous substance. If it takes six months for mice exposed to a higher amount of NOx than what would be in the city, think about how much it has effected the lives of older people who have lived in a city for their entire lives. It is not much of a political debate that any source of chemicals that can cause cancer should be eliminated, and this is why legislation is now starting to be passed against the use of diesel.

Another reason for cites to start to ban the use of diesel and for the general populations in the developed world to drop diesel is the development of electric cars in the past ten years. Electric cars are much, much cleaner to use within a city because they themselves do not emit any toxic emissions. The only emissions that electric cars cause is in the generation of the electricity that they use, which if supplied from clean energy sources such as nuclear or solar would cause no pollution, and in the manufacturing process. The upfront emissions from producing electric cars may be worse due to the toxic chemicals needed to produce batteries, but over time electric cars would be cleaner. These sources of pollution can be handled more easily than from cars themselves because instead of millions of points of pollution, one would only need to improve the technology to reduce one point of pollution.

Electric cars also make sense for cities because they are much more convenient to use than traditional forms of transportation. There is no need to stop for gas every week or pay for oil and fluid changes if your car has no fluids. They make little to no noise which would decrease the noise pollution within cities. They are also cheaper to run as they pull their electricity from the grid so the consumers fuel charge is added on to the electric bill and not from paying for expensive gas or diesel fuel. Electric cars also make more sense in cities than in the suburbs or in the rural country side because of their decreased range compared to traditional cars. Many electric car ranges are limited on the top end to around 200 miles, where gas burning cars can go double or even triple that distance. Tesla has capture the public’s perception of electric cars being the future of transportation, and many people are excited for the electric car world that humans may find themselves in sooner rather than later. 

It is understandable to think that banning cars from cities would cause there to be a huge problem for people who have to commute to work, and many people would be outraged that they would have to park their car outside of the city and take public transportation, so that why cities are starting to ban just diesels. By banning just diesels, these cities are getting rid of the most polluting vehicles being driven, and leaving the rest of the population able to commute as they would normally. This method could prove to be especially useful in the U.S. where only a small proportion of consumer cars, one percent for cars and less than one percent for light trucks, are diesel. America is also the country were banning cars outright would make the least amount of sense due to the huge scale of some cities, especially Los Angeles and New York, and the lack of sufficient public transportation. The U.S. is stuck in a terrible loop when it comes to public transportation where people generally don’t want to take it because it is terrible, and because no one takes it, no government wants to fund improvements for it. Banning some cars would cause a small part of the population to have to take public transportation, which would not only cause the government to consider improvement the transportation, but the cities would also make money from the increased use of busses or trains.

This leads to the conclusion that the banning of diesel make sense for the world, but banning gasoline cars make sense only for some cities in Europe and Asia. Some cities, especially London, Paris, and Tokyo, may be huge cities, but they are congested enough for people not to travel a large distance to go where they need to. Tokyo especially has grown to use the car such a small amount that many people commute across town in very small cars, called Kei cars, which are glorified golf carts. They are so small and weak on power that the U.S. government won’t allow importation of these Kei cars because they are not up to the standards of American roads. Converting these Kei cars to run on electricity would make a large amount of sense as it would decrease pollution and smog, as well as decrease the noise pollution of thousands of cars in a tight city. These Kei cars would also be very economical because they would run on a small amount of electricity to move the same amount of people as a larger diesel burning car.

Many of these cramped cities, especially London, have very cramped roads and streets because the cities were designed before cars were even a thing. They were not designed for a large amount of people driving cars, so commutes are long to go a relatively short distance. Taking a bike can save time from driving to a destination in certain cases. This is why it would make sense for these cities to ban cars and invest in trains or busses to save commuters time as well as free up streets for pedestrians and bikes. This would save a great number of people a large amount of time because bikes could travel faster and people would not be stuck in traffic at rush hour. 

Critics to banning cars could argue that to make a large part of the population give up, or at least bar the use, something that has become such a large part of humans lives today. Owning a car, for instance, signifies that you are growing up and becoming more responsible. The counterpoint to this argument is that if cigarettes are banned from being used in public, then why shouldn’t another known carcinogen? Cigarettes were a huge part of twentieth century culture, and were seen as cool to millions of people. They were then found to cause multiple types of cancer, including mouth and lung cancers, and were demonized by the public and then banned from being used in public places in many states. Would it make sense to ban one cause of cancer that was used every day and not another? The argument that banning something that a large part of the population uses and depends on daily wouldn’t make sense on the large scale does not hold up because lawmakers have done something similar to this already multiple years ago. 

Overall, the theory that cities should begin to phase out the use of diesels, and in many years even cars, within their cities is a solid plan. They can cause dangerous health defects and aggressive forms of cancer. They emit harmful pollutants which can hurt the environment and leave cities buried beneath a thick cloud of smog. There are much better suited vehicles, such as electric cars and even electric kei/ ultra-compact cars, for commuting around the dense urban sprawl that don’t pollute and can reduce noise and congestion. Diesel is especially vulnerable to being removed from use after the Volkswagen “Diesel Gate” incident where VW was found to be using a cheat device that showed a lower amount of NOx than what was actually produced in the real world. This led to the recall of millions of diesel cars, and has led to a lowering in consumer trust in diesel. That is why the time is right for cities to partake in the banning of the dangerous and harmful act of burning diesel as a form of transportation. 
