A sanctuary for fossil fuels, combustion engines, and exhaust fumes
On this website, I want to celebrate and promote the use of internal combustion engines for sports, leisure, and just for fun. Of course, diesel and gasoline engines are an indispensable tool for transport and industry. But even beyond their purposeful use, there's hardly an area of life where humans didn't manage to somehow introduce gas engines. Whether they're competing in motorsports events, enjoying some spare time activities with friends, or just powering their garden party with a gas-operated generator—people love to beef up all kinds of hobbies and pastimes by adding a few motors and plenty of fuel.
A varied and impassioned subculture has developed around the use of gas engines for fun, games, and sports. I call it petrol culture, or gasoline culture for any Americans out there. From kart racing to motocross, jet-skiing in the ocean, riding snowmobiles in the mountains, joyrides on the motor scooter, and radio-controlled model cars with gas engines—there's something for every taste and occasion. Regardless of age, gender, location, skills, views, and interests, there are appropriate motorsports and motorised hobbies for absolutely everybody. That's how diverse, inclusive, and welcoming petrol culture and its followers are.
These enjoyable, carefree, depending on one's views also thoughtless and unreasonable uses of gas engines are what these pages are all about. Here, I want to acknowledge and honour all the people who are wasting tons of fossil fuels on such frivolous uses, and encourage them to keep going. To everyone who secretly enjoys seeing the air being polluted senselessly and recklessly, I want to show that they don't have to feel ashamed and guilty for it, but that it's a completely natural and fairly common reaction. I want to help anyone interested in finding local events where they can watch and experience the air being needlessly contaminated. And for any visitors who want to take the next step and experience the thrill first-hand, I'll try to help by offering some ideas and pointers on the cheapest and most accessible ways to blow toxic exhaust fumes into nature just for fun!
A political motion in Italy aims to protect the gas-powered Vespa as a piece of cultural heritage. This declaration should allow the iconic motor scooters to violate European environmental laws.
In air polluted by the exhaust fumes of petrol engines, bees pollinate considerably fewer flowers because they can no longer smell them.
I wish you all a happy and healthy 2024! Read more about my plans for Abgase.org for the new year.
Sony Pictures is about to release a feature film based on a true story, following how a successful player of the Gran Turismo racing videogame became a real-world race car driver.
As the non-profit newsroom Pro Publica reports, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in spring approved new boat fuel additives by Chevron, whose exhaust fumes are a million times more carcinogenic than guidelines normally allow. Continued exposure to the fumes would statistically cause cancer in nearly 100% of people.
Open the blog to see older posts, or check the changelog to see what other pages have been updated.
📣 Have I missed something? If you're aware of any other news, studies, or events related to pollution or environmental destruction, please let me know!
Internal combustion engines are one of the most impressive achievements of human ingenuity and engineering. Also impressive is the creativity with which humanity keeps coming up with new applications for them. We've sealed gas engines up to be able to use them in watercraft, made them smaller so we could build them into vehicles for children, built them lighter so we could carry them as a backpack for yard work, attached alternators to them so we could use them to generate electricity, and tweaked their fuels to make them run well at freezing temperatures.
An estimated 200 million combustion engines are manufactured each year, and around two billion of them could be currently in existence. In the modern world, every kid knows what a gas engine is, and for teenagers, getting a first motorised vehicle of their own is an exciting milestone that they can hardly wait for. It's clear that gas engines are one of the most successful inventions in the history of mankind, and one of its most sought after goods.
But petrol engines don't just fascinate us because of their technological sophistication. They also appeal to our senses because they feel almost alive: we hear their puttering and revving, feel the vibrations of the firing cylinders, smell the piercing scents of gasoline and exhaust fumes, and see how the fumes shoot out of the exhaust pipes. I couldn't think of another human invention that seems so spirited and vibrant, so vigorous and dynamic, so enchantingly appealing.
Thanks to that, a colourful variety of different communities has emerged around the numerous forms of motorsports and motorised recreation. They dedicate themselves to the appreciation and maintenance of their respective motor vehicles or gas-powered sports equipment, form and cultivate friendships, spend their spare time together, and develop their own customs, conventions, trends, and fashions. They put time and effort into promoting their motorised hobby to the public, bringing in new people, and ensuring that there's a generation of young people who will carry on the traditions.
For a while, it seemed as though motorsports and motorised leisure activities had well established themselves in society at large. Combining the stunning physical abilities of the athletes with awesome engineering elegance, motorsports felt like the most modern form of sport imaginable, the most appropriate and timely sports for a high-tech world. Successful race drivers became media stars, the look and style of racing gear inspired the world of fashion, every teenager was riding a two-stroke scooter, and going to the kart racing track was a highly popular, commonplace spare time activity.
Unfortunately, my impression today is that the culture of gasoline engines and motorsports isn't as widely appreciated anymore. Its social acceptance has dropped, and in many areas it's being threatened by electric drives. The understanding and recognition of the technical ingenuity behind internal combustion engines is getting lost. And even though it embodies the pinnacles of so many areas of human creativity and brainpower that one could genuinely consider motorsports to be a crowning achievement of human history, many people these days would consider a leisure activity where fossil fuels are being burned to be outdated. That's what I want to fight against! The world of motorsports and motorised recreation is incredibly fascinating, exciting, thrilling, and rewarding. But there's no imagining it without gasoline engines, and there's no replacing them with anything else.
It's just those particularly appealing aspects of gasoline engines that many people see in a different light today. Instead of a vivaciously rattling engine, people hear noise pollution. Instead of feeling the jolting of a powerful petrol engine, they prefer the almost imperceptible hum of an electric motor. Mixing fuel and filling up the gas tank are no longer pleasant rituals of anticipation, but an inconvenient and unwelcome annoyance. And the pungent smell of two-stroke exhaust fumes no longer calls to mind carefree fun, thrills, and sporty activities, but conjures thoughts of global warming and the climate crisis.
But for many individuals, these elements are indispensable. There's no way of converting our sports and our hobbies from using gas-powered engines to electrical ones, without also destroying what makes them so appealing to us. The engine noise, the smell of petrol, and the clouds of exhaust gas aren't just unpleasant side effects to us, which unfortunately can't be prevented as long as gas engines are being used. They are, in fact, major reasons for why motorised pastimes bring so much joy to us.
Photo by Xavier Speleers, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED.
ID 66443496 © Alexey Kustov | Dreamstime.com
ID 165337443 © Karsten Eggert | Dreamstime.com
Photo Arizona RC Super Series - SRS Feb 10, 2007 by Cris Holdorph, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED.
Photo Smog by Simone Ramella, licensed under CC BY 2.0 DEED.
On these pages, I want to establish a dissenting voice against the current zeitgeist. Here, people should not be embarrassed to admit that they enjoy these incidental effects: the brash engine noises in the ears, the smell of fresh exhaust gas in the nose, the sight of thick exhaust fumes wafting over the race track. And they should be able to admit without a guilty conscience that thinking about how harmful the exhaust fumes are, and how much they contribute to the pollution of the environment, can in itself be a particular allure of motorsports.
I love the excitement of doing something unreasonable for once, something that's pretty much inexcusable considering how far-reaching its negative consequences are. Something completely legal which doesn't harm anyone, but still feels a bit evil and unconscionable. The temptation to do something inappropriate which increases my ecological footprint excessively, and the aftermath of which will outlast my own short existence many times over. The exhaust fumes my motorcycle's tailpipe emitted out into the atmosphere are probably going to have the most long-lasting effect of anything I did in my life!
I especially want to maintain this space because over the years, I have found out that there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Many of them kept those feelings a secret or tried to suppress them, before opening up after finding out that they're not the only ones. These views are very much politically incorrect, and these fondnesses don't fit the model of what people should rationally enjoy. Hopefully, these pages will help a great many people on their way to accepting this side of themselves, and ultimately getting to fully live out and enjoy these passions. Exhaust fumes are fun! So fill up the tank, put on your racing suit, and contaminate nature with some thick, noxious clouds of exhaust gas! Welcome to the Petrol Preserve, where internal combustion engines, fossil fuels, and exhaust fumes are under conservational protection.
Even when I was a little boy, the exhaust fumes of petrol engines occupied my mind a lot. As I was a very environmentally conscious kid, it made me very sad to see how casually and indifferently us humans polluted our nature. Wherever I spotted an exhaust pipe spewing out thick, stinking exhaust gas, I was so disgusted and outraged that I couldn't look away. The despicable smoke and the penetrating smell saddened and enraged me. I made a private promise to never use an internal combustion engine myself for as long as I lived.
But apart from my rational concern about exhaust fumes as a little tree hugger, there was apparently another reason why they were so tantalizing and captivating to me. I noticed that the sound of engines and the stench of exhaust also excited me in a visceral way. Not only that: I discovered that the more recklessly someone was polluting the air, the more devastating the pollution was, and the more pointless I found it to be – motorsports, warming up engines, or letting them idle for a long time – the more thrilling the situation felt to me. I even had a confusingly excited reaction when I saw seemingly healthy trees being cut down. Everything that was most upsetting to me as a would-be environmentalist gave me a massive adrenaline rush at the same time.
For some reason, that part of me felt a great pleasure whenever I had to witness the environment being contaminated and destroyed. It was an urge I couldn't suppress, so I started looking for situations of unscrupulous and senseless pollution in my everyday life, not just to deplore and condemn them internally as a tree hugger, but also appreciate and enjoy them as a lover of exhaust gas. Distressed because of the moral conflict this was causing with my environmental conscience, I kept trying to suppress those feelings. But ultimately, I gave in to the desire. I didn't want to just watch anymore, so I started arranging for situations in which I could play around with running engines and pollute the air with exhaust fumes of my own – deliberately without any purpose.
At some point, I decided that this fight against my "dark side" was hopeless and that life was too short. Instead of being embarrassed about my passion for exhaust fumes, I wanted to go the opposite way and celebrate it. That's when I decided to create my first website about the joys and pleasures of exhaust fumes and senseless air pollution. I had collected many pictures of exhaust gas, scenes of air pollution which I found particularly stirring and alluring, and used them to illustrate what I liked about it. I also shared some theories I had come up with on how such a strange fondness could have come to be. What happened next caught me by surprise: I realised that I wasn't the only person on the planet with these thoughts and feelings.
Soon I started regularly getting e-mails from people who were secretly also into exhaust fumes, and recognised themselves in my descriptions. Many of them even told me similar stories: starting from a strong sense of environmentalism, followed by years of suppressing the conflicting feelings, and being especially thrilled by situations where the pollution was caused mindlessly or without purpose. But most importantly, many of those who were writing to me were grateful to have found the site and finally know that there are other people who understand. On the one hand, there seem to be many thousands, if not millions of people that secretly have a thing for petrol exhaust. On the other hand, most of them instinctively assume that they're the only ones in the world who are crazy in that way.
That's why I decided to revive my website. I want to allow many, many more "closeted" exhaust fume enthusiasts to find out that they're not alone, that they can find like-minded people and exchange stories and thoughts.
On a separate page about me, I write in much more detail about how I discovered my love for exhaust fumes, and how my approach to it changed over the years. That little biography is probably most interesting to those visitors who have recognised glimpses of themselves in the short version above. But maybe there are some "outsiders", who find this whole thing awfully bizarre, but still would like to learn a little more about it?
I try to find a balance between these two target audiences on the site. Of course, the site is mainly written for those who share my passion for exhaust fumes, people who are attracted to stories, reports, photos, and videos of pointless air pollution. But I hope to also give random visitors a glimpse into this world of weird feelings and thoughts, and maybe even make it somewhat intelligible to them, to the point that that's even possible. Hopefully, it will at least be comprehensible in the sense that we all have our quirks, kinks, and dirty little secrets. And because barely anyone else is writing about mine, I'll try to do it as exhaustively and descriptively as I can.
Finally, I'm also writing these pages for myself. As incomprehensible as these fondnesses might be for others, they're still a huge mystery to myself, too. How can it be that a human being can find the contamination of its own environment, the desecration and destruction of its own basis of existence, so arousing? Biologically, we should be drawn to partners who ensure the highest chance of survival for potential offspring – so it's completely paradoxical that I was always most attracted to women who were recklessly polluting the environment our children would be growing up in. Is this penchant something instinctive and primal, or did it emerge out of certain influences during early childhood? By collecting my thoughts on these pages, and exchanging theories with visitors, maybe I'll find out a little more about it.
Whether you were brought here by your exhaust fume fetish, pure curiosity, or mere coincidence: I welcome you to my little, virtual petrol preserve.
