Comment by Arainach
10 hours ago
> also, what scale of harm do you think exists from those people?
Serious health complications, particularly to cyclists and pedestrians. Significant pollution surges:
> According to government estimates, the practice can increase nitrogen oxide emissions as much as 310 times, non-methane hydrocarbons 1,400 times, and carbon monoxide 120 times. [https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/rolling-coal-donal...]
> AED estimates that the emissions controls have been removed from more than 550,000 diesel pickup trucks in the last decade. As a result ofthis tampering, more than 570,000 tons of excess oxides of nitrogen(NOx) and 5,000 tons of particulate matter (PM) will be emitted by these tampered trucks over the lifetime of the vehicles. [https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/epa-on-tampered-diese...]
The reason diesel folks delete emissions is because the way the new diesel motors are set up actually kills the motor. Buying a new motor (or a whole truck!) is extremely expensive. Now if the automotive industry came out with an efficient diesel that also ran well for more than 100k miles, we’d see a lot less deletions.
It's far more expensive to run a chemical plant where you just dump your waste products in the river, but that doesn't make it right or legal.
All 550K diesels with modded emissions are not rolling coal, that is a wild extrapolation
I didn’t ask the multiplier of badness of a single individual doing a bad and stinky thing, I asked what you think the _scale_ is. Do you believe that all people with trucks modified to do this are doing it at all times? Or even half the time? How many people do you think are doing it?
I am absolutely certain that more people are rolling coal than are tinkering with their engine timings for benign performance reasons.