Welcome to the Petrol Preserve

Gasoline engines are shameless machines. They're loud, dirty, and they stink. They burn non-renewable fossil fuels and poison the environment. Those who choose to use them show no regard for the rest of us, whose breathing air they pollute. They force us to inhale the toxic, carcinogenic exhaust fumes they leave behind. Using a motorised tool or vehicle is a personal choice, but everybody suffers the consequences: serious health risks, a contaminated nature, and catastrophic climate change.

Diesel and gasoline engines play an important role in transportation and industry. You could argue that the harm they cause is justified by the importance and purpose of the work. But there's also a darker truth: millions of people choose to burn gasoline for much more mindless reasons. They go for joyrides, tend their yards with gas-powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers, or participate in one of the countless forms of motorsports. Even though these motors are literally destroying our basis of life, everybody is free to gas up, rev their engine, and pollute the air for the most frivolous reasons. How is something so outrageously wasteful and morally reprehensible even allowed?

This website addresses those carefree and aimless uses of internal combustion engines, and the people who seem to have no qualms about ravaging our environment for their own personal amusement. There's hardly anything in life that humans haven't found some way to introduce a gas engine to. Whether they're going karting with friends, enjoying a ride on a jetski, mowing their lawn, or just powering their garden party soundsystem with a gas-operated generator—people just love to beef up all kinds of hobbies and pastimes by adding a few motors and burning plenty of fuel. They have every right to do so, and we have no right to stop them, while we're helpless against the toxic fumes spewing from their tailpipes and filling our lungs.

Many would consider burning gasoline just for fun and leisure to be irresponsible, reckless, and contemptible. Yet a large part of the population seems to have a different attitude. Over decades, a varied and passionate subculture around the recreational use of gasoline engines has developed. I call it petrol culture, or gasoline culture in American terms. Others have used the term thrillcraft.

From kart racing to motocross, riding jetskis in the ocean or snowmobiles in the mountains, joyrides on the motor scooter, or radio-controlled model cars with gasoline engines—there's something for every taste and occasion. Regardless of age, gender, location, skills, means, views, or interests, there are motorsports and motorised hobbies for absolutely everybody. The people taking part in them value their personal thrill and enjoyment higher than an intact environment, other people's health, or, in fact, their own.

Internal combustion engines are one of the most impressive achievements of human ingenuity and engineering. With fossil fuels having quickly become the most abundant, practical, affordable, and efficient power source, mankind started coming up with countless ideas on what to use these new machines for.

Far from just replacing older energy sources in industry, their raw and direct power also made gasoline engines incredibly fun to use. Almost anything could be made more exciting by strapping an engine to it. We've sealed them up to use them in watercraft, made them smaller to build vehicles for children, built them lighter so we could carry them as a backpack for yard work, attached alternators so we could generate electricity with them, and tweaked their fuels to make them run even at freezing temperatures.

That's why an estimated 200 million combustion engines are manufactured each year, and there may be around two billion of them currently in existence. Today, every child knows what a gasoline engine is, what it sounds and smells like. Teenagers can hardly wait until they're old enough to get their very first own moped or motor scooter. Petrol engines are everywhere, making them one of the most successful inventions in history, and one of humanity's most sought after goods.

But petrol engines don't just fascinate us because of their technological sophistication. They also appeal to our primal senses because, unlike any other machine we've ever built, they feel almost alive. After having started an engine we hear it puttering away, we feel the heat it gives off and the vibrations of the firing cylinders, eager to get to work or do something exciting. It seems to be a living, breathing creature—because it is breathing, almost the same as us, inhaling fresh, oxygen-rich air and exhaling back out its used up exhaust fumes. And with each slight twitch at the throttle, it screams out like a fierce predator, shooting out another plume of smoke. No other machine feels so vivid, vigorous, and vibrant.

No matter what you actually use it for, with its purring and howling, the unmistakeable, piercing scent of burnt oil and gasoline, and the thick, blue fumes pouring out of the exhaust pipe, a running engine in and of itself is enchanting and appealing on a deeply human level.

For a while, it seemed as though motorsports and motorised leisure activities had become a firmly established part of modern society. Cheap and fun as they are, people were looking for ways to incorporate gasoline engines into their spare time and social activities, and facilities to support them opened up in many places.

Every larger town had a kart racing track, and the most popular vacation activities included jetski rides, snowmobile tours, and scooter rentals. Low-threshold motorsports such as motocross became grassroots sports for all. Races were held everywhere, becoming popular public festivals.

Relatively affordable equipment and welcoming clubs allowed almost everyone to try it out themselves. Children's clubs made sure that even the youngest had a chance to discover and enter the exciting world of gas-powered motorsports.

On the professional level, successful race drivers became major celebrities. Their racing gear was seen as attractive and inspired the world of fashion. Combining the impressive and elegant engineering of high-performance race engines with the stunning physical skills of the athletes, motorsports were clearly the most modern and timely sports humans had ever come up with.

Petrol culture seeped into every part of society. Any teenager lucky enough to get one had their first taste of freedom and mobility on a motor scooter which took them to school, friends, hangouts, or just a ride out. Allowance money turned into a petrol allowance, the thought of running out of gas before the end of the weekend was terrifying! You used to be able to tell when school was out by listening for the aggressive beehive of small-bore engines being warmed up, and the entire school grounds disappearing in a blue haze of pungent two-stroke exhaust fumes.

Humanity's indifference to nature deeply saddened me as a child. I've always had a very strong environmental consciousness, and even when I was a little boy, the pollution caused by petrol engines occupied my mind a lot. Whenever I saw a car's tailpipe spewing out thick, stinking clouds of exhaust gas, I was so disgusted and outraged that I couldn't look away. I promised myself that I'd never use a gasoline engine myself. But nothing could've prepared me for the shock of finding out that people didn't just do this because they needed to work, or go somewhere, but also for fun and sport. The thought that people would cause such pollution wilfully and for no serious reason was appalling to me. How could they live with themselves?

Still worse was knowing that even young people, including children my age, were doing this. I'd once had some hope that we, the younger generations, would do better than the indifferent grown-ups, and respect the environment we depend on. But those other kids my age must have known how harmful the fumes coming from their mopeds and scooters were. If they decided that their fun was more important to them anyway, what hope was there for the future? It made me feel devastated and helpless.

But as my thoughts about motors, exhaust gas and pollution kept preoccupying me, I started noticing other emotions. Gradually, these acts of senseless pollution made me feel not just sad and appalled, but also curious, even excited. Was it the allure of evil and the forbidden? The whirlwind of feelings I got from watching pristine nature being desecrated with noxious exhaust fumes—sadness, anger, anxiety, thrill—was so overwhelming that I wanted to see more of it.

When I saw someone recklessly polluting, I used to watch them in horror. I knew that I wouldn't be able to do anything about it, but felt as if I owed it to nature to at least bear witness to the devastation. Now, I started catching myself defiantly spurring them on in my mind. Maybe I felt so powerless about not being able to stop them that I tried to regain control that way, pretending as if it was what I wanted them to do. I turned the tables, finding a way to actually take pleasure in watching them pollute the air. Instead of feeling disheartened that I couldn't stop the exhaust fumes from pouring out, I now hoped they would pump even more poison into the air, just to satisfy my craving as I watched.

Noticing these feelings confused and distressed me. It was a tough moral conflict: the things that were most upsetting to me as an environmentally conscious boy also made me feel a great rush. Seeing exhaust fumes was more thrilling the more senseless I thought the pollution was, such as people mindlessly letting their engines idle or warm up, or burning fuel for motorsports. When a scooter drove by, I felt most excited if it was the sound and smell of a two-stroke engine, which I had learned were hundreds of times more polluting than cars. I even started to feel excited when seeing majestic, seemingly healthy trees being felled. Decades of beautiful growth, mercilessly cut down in a couple of minutes by a cold-hearted worker—with a chainsaw spewing exhaust fumes into the forest, to add insult to injury.

This is how my obsession with senseless and recreational air pollution came to be, and the cognitive dissonance lasts to this day. The tree hugger in me hoped with all their heart that the dirtbike rider in the forest wouldn't start their engine, or if they did, that it would be a low-polluting, cleanly burning engine, and that the rider would be considerate of nature and not let the engine idle for too long or rev it unnecessarily. At the same time, a primal, sensual part deep inside of me hoped to see the bike spewing out thick, pungent clouds of exhaust, oil sputtering onto the leaves, and the rider warming up the engine for so long that the woods would be suffocating in a noxious blue plume.

Not so long ago, as mentioned earlier on this page, petrol culture was pervasive in society. Motorsports were mainstream, and entire generations of young people built their self-image and understanding of freedom around motorised two-wheelers. The boy or girl with the scooter was the cool and popular one, arriving with a roaring engine, proudly carrying around their helmet, their clothes always faintly smelling of exhaust when they sat next to you in class or in a café. You either had a motorcycle yourself, or slightly envied those who did.

But petrol culture has seen a noticeable decline in popularity. With people growing increasingly concerned about their environmental impact, internal combustion engines have almost become socially frowned upon, especially when they're used for amusement purposes. Motorsports have become objectionable. The very idea of a sports where fossil fuels are being burned is seen as representing and oudated mindset, where people didn't know or care that they were burning up the world for fun.

Even before Fridays for Future, the classmate with the scooter wasn't always the cool and rebellious one anymore. To some of her peers, she's the selfish one who seems carefree about destroying the planet and everybody's future.

At the same time, petrol engines are threatened to be replaced by electric drives in many areas. The understanding and appreciation of the ingenious engineering of combustion engines is getting lost. Most notably, two-strokes are disappearing. Due to ever tightening vehicle emission standards, they're being punished for their very principle of operation. Because they burn oil along with the gasoline, and expel a substantial amount of their fuel unburnt, their exhaust gas is many times more harmful than that of the more common four-strokes.

Where electric drives aren't common yet, four-stroke engines have mostly taken over the market. It's become rare to find new two-stroke models of sportsbikes, snowmobiles and jetskis, where two-strokes were condemned for the amount of oil they release into the water. Although riding a four-stroke is still a more real and authentic motorsports experience than not having a combustion engine at all, they cannot replace the vibrant, sporty handling and performance of a two-stroke. They also lack the aggressive, bee-like sound, the thick, blue clouds of exhaust, and the pungent, biting smell of freshly burnt premix that, to many people, are central aspects of the motorsports atmosphere they adore.

Four-strokes were on the rise in motorsports, too. Even though there are no emission limits to obey in motorsports, manufacturers often can't justify spending research and development on two-stroke technology if they can't market it in their street-legal models. However, at least in amateur circles, a significant and stable part of the community maintains a strong preference for two-strokes. Particularly in dirtbikes and race karts, there's enough of a demand, and people freshly switching to two-strokes, that continued production should be ensured.

One more market where two-strokes are still holding up well is gardening equipment. Thanks to their unbeatable affordability and practicality compared to electric alternatives, this is another, if unlikely, area where two-stroke culture can still be fostered. You can still see, hear, and smell plenty of two-stroke engines in the neighbourhood whenever people bring out their lawn trimmers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws. It may just be yard work, but the revving of the two-strokes and the smell of premix are almost like at the races!

Due to their light weight, simplicity, and low cost, two-strokes were also traditionally predominant in vehicles built for teenagers—mopeds, scooters, and small motorcycles. Two-stroke scooters and motorcyles becoming rarer, and almost exclusively found second-hand, directly affects young generations and could threaten the preservation of petrol culture. Petrol culture and two-stroke culture can only be maintained if the younger generations are introduced to it.

While, by all accounts, young people are still very susceptible to the charm of a two-stroke engine, they first have to know that they exist and are an option. A person can only discover their preference for two-strokes if they're exposed to them. They need to be able to see them, get to know the brisk and feisty feel of riding them, get familiar with their garish engine sound and experience the piercing smell of their exhaust in order to find out that they might have much more fun with them than a four-stroke, let alone an electric model. With two-strokes disappearing from much of motorsports and road traffic, less of them being on the roads and in dealerships every day, these experiences have become increasingly difficult to come by.

After school is out, the schoolyard usually isn't shrouded in a spectacular, blue plume of exhaust anymore. Only a few scattered fumes can be seen jetting out from under the bike shelter. But these mopeds and scooters are still the prime gateways to a lifelong passion for motorised pastimes. It takes just one girl or boy with a scooter to potentially pass the petrol culture bug on to a whole group of friends.

Without this random exposure, many of them might never even have considered motorcycles or motorsports as a fun and accessible possibility. But then a group of their friends prepares to head home on their scooters, subjecting them to the mayhem of small-bore engines being warmed up. As they're getting wrapped in a stifling plume of smoke and smell the oily exhaust, they may just get hooked… and put a scooter on their wish list, or take notice of that flyer for a local motocross tryout.

Even though two-stroke scooters are still popular with young people in the countryside and suburbs, where I grew up, the decline is noticeable there, too. I always loved when in the afternoons, so many teens used to be out and about on their mopeds that a faint, lingering smell of two-stroke exhaust could suddenly engulf you anywhere and anytime—on the playground, indoors with the windows open, or in the middle of the forest. Often, no motorcycle could be seen or heard anywhere, the fumes just being wafted in by the wind. These events have become much more infrequent. For two-stroke culture to survive, they mustn't be confined to remote sporting events or dedicated meet-ups. The random, sudden whiff of two-stroke exhaust would need to be a common, everyday thing again.

Despite everything, motorsports are still very popular. People still love driving and riding all sorts of motor vehicles for fun. The world of motorsports and motorised recreation, particularly using two-stroke engines, is fascinating, exciting, thrilling, and rewarding. Unfortunately, it's currently facing a lot of social and political backlash. Taking part in these activities means burning non-renewable fossil fuels, polluting the air, contaminating nature, and contributing to climate change. It's incompatible with a politically correct, environmentally conscious stance.

I'm under the impression that when dealing with the general public, people from the motorsports scene tend to downplay or hide the fact that their pastime fills the atmosphere with noxious exhaust fumes. Events take place in remote locations, and photos for the press are carefully selected to not show any hints of smoke. Nobody wants to risk a controversy.

I'm choosing a different path by taking the offensive. I don't talk down the environmental impact of two-stroke motorsports, or claim that the problem can be solved through innovative technologies. Instead, I state honestly that for me, and many people like me, the very part about motorsports that pollutes the environment is a major reason for why I'm into them so much. For that reason, it's also not possible to replace the gasoline-powered engines and go electric. That would turn these sports into entirely different disciplines, which lack much of what I find appealing about them.

I know from conversations that many motorsports fans and athletes share this sentiment. The noise of the engines, the thick swathes of exhaust gas, and the smell of burnt gasoline and oil are not just unfortunate, unpleasant, sadly unpreventable side effects of racing with combustion engines. They're actually crucial parts of what makes us love motors and motorised pastimes so much. Among riders, and in the "safe space" of motorsports events, this often isn't even a controversial topic.

It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't yet discovered the allure of petrol culture, but the very things that might seem repulsive or indefensible to an environmentalist are part of what make these sports and activities so appealing to us in the first place. Although I actually suspect that the sensory appeal of motors and exhaust fumes is quite universal. If it didn't come with any of the baggage, wasn't unhealthy or harmful to the environment, I belive many environmentalists would love the feeling of direct connection to a powerful machine, and even find the exhaust smell pleasing. After all, even eco-minded people will quite commonly admit that they kind of like the smell at the gas station.

Having established that enjoying the sight and smell of exhaust fumes could be pretty common, you may have noticed already in an earlier section that it goes yet a step further for me. It's not only that I've taken a liking to exhaust fumes, which just happen to also be harmful to the environment. The very fact of the pollution is a turn-on in itself. After all, it's their environmental impact which got me interested in motorsports in the first place.

As an eco-minded boy, I was in disbelief about how callously nature was ravaged by motorsports. The riders were having fun, enjoying the event and absorbed in the excitement of the competition. But every single one of them was sitting on an engine, burning gasoline by the gallon, churning out toxic plumes through their exhaust pipes with every twist of the throttle. The fumes were burning in my throat and made breathing uncomfortable. Again and again, the beautiful landscape was suffocated in a filthy cloud of poison. As the wind dispersed the fumes, I thought about how the toxic pollutants would spread and stay in nature forever, hurting trees and animals, causing acid rain and global warming.

The more harmful I thought the exhaust fumes were for the environment, the more devastated I felt. I was even more appalled when I thought that the pollution was caused for no good reason. The more indignant and helpless I felt, the stronger those other feelings of thrill and morbid pleasure came up, as well. That's why my attention shifted to motorsports, where I couldn't see the least bit of rational justification for causing so much pollution, and to two-stroke engines, which emit much higher amounts of toxic substances.

But I wasn't just an environmentalist boy who gave in to the thrills, sounds, sights, and smells of motorcycles and motorsports. That would've been easier to come to terms with. Everybody has their guilty pleasures. I had to admit that it was the pollution itself that was attracting and exciting me. One side of me thought that the massive amounts of fuel wasted and air poisoned at a motocross race was a shameful atrocity, while another side was aroused by seeing all the pollution, and the thought that people were causing it for sheer fun.

It was a moral dilemma. I only developed such a keen interest in motorsports and pollution because I cared for the environment so much. Being powerless to stop the devastation, I at least wanted to see it all happen. I wanted to make sure that someone was there to witness the destruction, apart from the person causing it. Someone to testify to the horrible ways humans were treating the environment, to keep alive the memory of the trees that were cut down, to carry all of the anger and sadness as motivation for fighting back in the future.

I started deliberately seeking out places to witness these moments, trying to not miss anything. I hung around the moped and scooter parking after school, because I wanted to observe the smoke puffing out of the tiny exhaust pipes when the engines were started. Whenever possible, I tried to stand where I could smell the fumes, as if to confirm that they're as pungent and harmful as I feared. When I passed by the stumps of recently felled trees, I felt devastated that I had missed witnessing them being cut down.

It's the great irony of my life that this constant and conscious exposure to exhaust fumes and tree fellings, which was meant to strengthen my resolve as a would-be environmentalist, led to developing completely opposite feelings. Constantly obsessing over these topics, combined with the sensory experiences and emotional arousal from watching the events unfold—the stinging smell of exhaust gas, the ceaseless rattle of a running engine, the poisonous cloud relentlessly wafting away into nature, the tight chest and adrenaline rush of helplessly watching a favourite tree being cut down—may have led to this connection in my brain. At that point, it probably became self-enforcing. Remembering the terrible events I had witnessed, the senseless air pollution and the majestic trees falling down, I was reminded of the pleasurable feelings I had experienced then, reinforcing the idea that it was thinking about the environmental damage itself that caused the nice sensations.

As I started connecting with people who share the same feelings, I was amazed to learn how many of them had a similar history: a strong eco-consciousness as a child, heavily obsessing over environmental topics, then suddenly starting to discover thrilling and pleasurable feelings when seeing or thinking about pollution.

My guess is that this is down to a process similar to reaction formation. Thoughts about environmental destruction caused us great distress, but we felt helpless to do anything about it. Developing a desire for the opposite of what we had wished to happen could have been a way of coping. People are going to pollute regardless, so hoping for them to stop is bound to end in despair. But if we find pleasure in the pollution, and can pretend that it's actually what we want people to do, we can feel in control again.

Luckily, I don't suffer because of this curious fondness. It didn't stand in the way of a healthy and otherwise normal youth. But it did cause many confusions and contradictions. Isn't it completely paradoxical for someone to derive so much pleasure from something which is destroying their basis of life? Natural sciences teach me that I should feel most attracted to women who would ensure the best survival for our potential offspring—yet here I was as a teenager, most turned on by a pretty girl when she was revving her dirtbike, spewing poison into the air, destroying the planet for future generations.

I want to point out that none of this turned me into an anti-environmentalist or climate change denier. I don't enjoy witnessing pollution in general, I only find pleasure in it when people are polluting for fun and sport, senselessly and shamelessly. I support sustainable policies and going green, wherever it doesn't matter where the power is coming from. In sports, it often does, and there's no substitute for gasoline-powered engines for people like me.