Exhaust Gas

What is exhaust gas?

Exhaust gases are a byproduct of any combustion process. In this context, we're referring specifically to the gases expelled by internal combustion engines. An engine produces its power by drawing in fresh air, mixing it with fuel, and igniting the mixture with a spark. The combustion burns up most of the air's oxygen, and in turn produces dozens of byproducts. As this gas cannot be ignited again, the engine has to get rid of it to make room for fresh air. It pushes the gas back out into the surrounding environment through an exhaust pipe. Because the gas this air has been turned into is essentially useless, exhaust gas is also called waste gas. As long as the motor keeps on running, it keeps taking in fresh air and turning it into exhaust gas.

Many of the elements contained in the exhaust gas of petrol engines are very harmful. They cause severe health issues for humans and animals who are exposed to them. People living in areas with high levels of air pollution from exhaust gases have a significantly higher risk of developing respiratory diseases or cancer. Breathing in high concentrations of exhaust gas can even lead to death from suffocation within just minutes, as carbon monoxide inhibits the blood's ability to carry oxygen. Apart from these direct, noxious effects, exhaust gas also has severe effects on Earth's climate. As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere, which is a major factor contributing to global warming. Ozone formed from nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons hurts the ability of plants to perform photosynthesis. Exhaust gases can cause so-called acid rain, which damages forests, soils, and aquatic life. Toxic gasoline and oil residues contained in the gas are deposited on surface waters and seep into the ground water, accumulating in plants and wildlife, and entering the food chain to cause further health damage.

After having been invented in the 19^th century, gasoline engines have seen explosive adoption in industry and transportation, leading to a huge demand for oil. They quickly and completely transformed the world, leading to unprecedented productivity gains and personal mobility. However, the massive amounts of air pollution caused by the exhaust gas of hundreds of millions of motors has turned into a major cause of catastrophic, global climate change, the most severe effects of which are still ahead of us. However, because these engines are so convenient and extremely cheap to run, humanity has so far been incapable of breaking its habit of burning about a trillion liters of gasoline each year. A trillion liters of fuel which is turned into exhaust gas, polluting our atmosphere and turning the air we breathe toxic.

My personal perspective on exhaust gas

It seems clear that exhaust gas is bad and undesirable to the core, something everyone would find wretched and repulsive. One of the few things in the world which are entirely negative, with no upside to them. It's a side effect of running combustion engines which, if it was in any way possible, everybody would choose to prevent.

So how could I possibly say that I like exhaust fumes? What could get someone to actually be fond of something which poisons the air we breathe, makes us sick, and is destroying the natural environment we depend on for survival?

I spent a lot of time trying to find answers to those questions, but there are no straightforward ones. The one I find most satisfactory is a common theory on how "kinks" in general are believed to often develop. According to the theory of imprinting, people can develop such a penchant for seemingly random objects or features if they're coincidentally exposed to them during the phase of discovering their bodies and certain feelings. The brain ends up inadvertently connecting these objects or features to those feelings of pleasure. From there on out, some classical conditioning might do the trick. You seek out the things that were around when you last had those pleasurable feelings, and because it ends up being pleasurable again, the connection is reinforced. I was way too young then to have understood what was happening, and I must have been told early on that it was inappropriate to indulge in that kind of thing in public. But I remember that my mind clearly connected the dots: thinking about exhaust gas and pollution leads to nice feelings.

That leaves the question: why was exhaust gas on my mind so much that this coincidence could have even happened? Why was it such a big topic for me, at such a young age, for me to apparently have been thinking about it throughout the day?

I grew up during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when pollution and environmentalism started to turn into big topics in society and media. A lot of this was directly targeted at children. Magazines and TV shows emphatically appealed to our conscience. We were told that animals were going extinct, and shown pictures of loggers illegally cutting down the rainforest. They explained to us that cars and motorcycles were bad, and that their exhaust fumes were killing the trees by causing acid rain. It was a relentless stream of bad news, meant to raise us into responsible world citizens and wanting to help save the planet. In my case, they went too far. I just felt heartbroken and hopeless at how humans were treating the environment.

The fact that I reacted so emotionally turned the topic from just something I cared about, into a veritable obsession. My feelings were probably stirred so much because these articles and reports always showed the devastating effects of what people were doing, but usually not why they were doing it, or why they didn't stop. I didn't know that those loggers were cutting down trees to feed their families. All I saw was evil men destroying a beautiful rainforest and making animals lose their homes. And I didn't understand why people built cars and motorcycles with exhaust pipes that spew poison out into nature. Why did they build them with exhaust pipes in the first place, or why didn't they just collect the fumes somewhere where they wouldn't do any damage? I didn't see exhaust pipes as the only reasonable way to dispose of the natural byproduct of a petrol engine. I thought that they were built that way, shamelessly pointing out into the open air, simply because people didn't care enough to do anything to stop them from polluting.

Exhaust gas as a showpiece of pollution

Humans pollute and destroy their environment in countless ways. I was aware that we were also poisoning our oceans, filling the world with plastic litter, cutting down forests, destroying the ozone layer, creating radioactive waste, and driving animal species to extinction. But the focus of my obsession, by a long shot, was always exhaust gas. I can connect all of the numerous other quirky fondnesses I developed later, more or less directly, back to this original interest in exhaust gas. It's even the title of this website: Abgase is the German word for exhaust gases. I was so self-conscious about my feelings on exhaust fumes, and so afraid that anybody might find out, that to this day, I struggle saying the word out loud in public, and I get nervous when somebody else does.

I grew up in Switzerland where, for the most part, the air and water are clean. There are no huge waste dumps, and littering isn't a big issue. There's a lot of beautiful nature and healthy forests. The dramatic effects or pollution feel far away for a child growing up there. Exhaust fumes were an exception. Whenever I was near a road, I could hear the engines roaring, I could see the smoke coming out of the exhaust pipes, and I could smell the acrid stench. It was undeniable confirmation that things were really as bad as the magazines and TV shows told me. I saw with my own eyes how much dirt a small motor scooter belched out into the air, and if the plume drifted towards me, the pungent smell left me with no doubt that it must be extremely unhealthy and harmful.

The occasional tree was cut down around where I lived, as well, which is also very direct and dramatic evidence of humans destroying the environment. It did, in fact, also become one of my main penchants, second only to exhaust gas. But seeing a tree being cut down was much rarer, and I usually only witnessed it from far away, hearing a chainsaw roaring somewhere in the distance, and, if I was lucky, seeing some far-off treetop keel over 📺 . Most often, the only evidence I would see were the tree stumps after everything was already over. Exhaust gas, on the other hand, was something I was confronted with almost every day. No other form of pollution is as imposing on the senses as a thick, billowing cloud of exhaust, and an oily smell stinging in one's nostrils. I'm not surprised that this is what I focussed my shock, sadness, and anger on.

Control over helplessness

In psychological research, there's a theory that tendencies like mine can arise out of feelings of helplessness. I only discovered this approach to an explanation fairly recently, but it feels quite plausible to me.

According to this theory, it wasn't necessarily an arbitrary occurrence that I started to enjoy myself while thinking about exhaust fumes. I suffered a lot from the knowledge that there was nothing I could do against the pollution caused by exhaust gas. The whole world seemed to be using petrol engines, always and everywhere, without giving it a second thought. It was an unstoppable mass of people, irreparably poisoning nature and not seeing the problem. I was just a little boy, completely powerless against this destruction. To draw joy and pleasure from this ultimate evil might then have been a way for me to regain a sense of control in the face of this powerlessness. No matter how much I wanted to, there was nothing I could do to prevent the exhaust fumes I saw all around me, but I could influence what kind of reaction they triggered in me. I would even have the power to decide to start using motors myself, blowing exhaust fumes into the world, with even less of a real purpose than anybody else…

I could never completely suppress or cast off my environmental consciousness. Rationally, I was much too aware of how bad things looked for the environment, and how serious the consequences were. But I could fight the feeling of helplessness that these crushing experiences and thoughts caused in me, by countering it with an alternative reaction. The people polluting the air with exhaust fumes wanted to make me sad, to break my will and make me lose hope. But now I was standing up to them in defiance. "Go ahead then, pollute! Waste even more gas, fill the air with even more exhaust gas, desecrate and poison the last remaining pieces of unspoilt nature – I want you to do it, I like it, it gives me joy!"

Enduring this inner conflict is easier today. I can question myself and better put things in perspective. I can accept that a mostly bodily, primal, and instinctive part of me is craving after things that are in conflict with my actual self-perception and views. I can even give in to those urges and enjoy it, without agonising over it. If my guilty conscience starts bothering me, I can reassure myself that the few litres of fuel I burn for fun aren't going to have a measurable environmental impact in the big picture. This was much more difficult for me up until my teenage years. Every little cloud of exhaust gas was terrible and devastating. When, at around age 13, I started an engine on my own 📺 for the first time (a nasty polluter of a two-stroke, to boot), my sense of guilt was crushing! Especially because, at the same time, I liked what had happened. I only let the engine run for a few seconds, but these little puffs of exhaust existed now, forever. I couldn't put them back. They were going to waft away, spoil some spot of nature somewhere, make a tree sick, or be inhaled by an animal.

Facets

Sensory impressions

An "exhaust gas fetish" is probably a pretty common tendency, at least compared to many of the other topics on this site. This is in large part due to the sensory factors.

• 👃 Smell: Exhaust fumes of gasoline engines have a very intense, complex smell. This is largely thanks to the unburnt hydrocarbons, other volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and residue of unburnt fuel that they contain.
  • Because of the many substances that form during combustion, exhaust fumes have a very different, more multi-layered smell than the comparatively clean, medicinal, piercing smell of gasoline, which comes mostly from pure hydrocarbons such as benzene.
  • It's almost common knowledge that many people like the smell of gasoline and exhaust gas. One possible reason is that it conjures up positive memories from childhood. It's also possible, however, that certain components of engine exhaust have an arousing effect und humans on a purely physiological level.
  • The exhaust fumes of two-stroke engines have a particularly distinctive smell. This is partly because they run on mixed fuel and therefore also burn some oil, but also because due to their working principle, up to a third of the fuel is emitted out of the exhaust again, completely unburned. You often hear or read that people dislike the smell of modern car exhaust, but find the smell of two-stroke exhaust, for example from motor scooters or off-road motorcycles, to be pleasant. On an emotional level, maybe that could be explained by two-stroke fumes evoking good memories of one's youth, or of exciting motorsports events. On a physiological level, the higher amount of unburned components could make the smell more stimulating. That two-stroke engines are most often built into vehicles used by young people or during leisure activities might explain why the smell of two-stroke is often described as having a more brisk, vigorous, "sporty" smell.
  • Diesel fumes are in a whole different world. In my experience, most consider their smell to be unpleasant. Because of the amount of soot and other particulate matter, they can cause an uncomfortable chafing feeling in the upper airways. Because of the lower amounts of aromatic hydrocarbons, diesel fumes smell more heavy and sooty, and sometimes remind of burned rubber.
  • Some components of exhaust gas which help to define its smell are:
  • Benzene is a volatile hydrocarbon with a pleasantly sweet smell.
  • Toluol and xylenes are also aromatic hydrocarbons with an intensely sweet smell.
  • Aldehydes are substantially responsible for the pungent, stinging smell of exhaust gas.
  • Unburnt hydrocarbons are responsible for the smell of fresh gasoline. They escape through the exhaust pipe due to incomplete combustion. Therefore, they're especially prevalent in the exhaust fumes of two-stroke engines, which spew up to a third of their fuel back out through the exhaust, unused.
  • Longer hydrocarbon chains in diesel fuel are denser and less volatile, and are what make the smell of diesel fumes heavier and more oily.
  • Particulate matter emitted by diesel engines give them a sooty, smoky smell.
• ♨ Warmth: The exhaust fumes have to be discharged from the engine right after ignition to make room for fresh gas mixture. Just moments after the spark ignites the fuel-air mixture in the cylinder, the used up air streams out of the exhaust pipe or exhaust opening, and is therefore still hot. Too close to the exhaust, the heat is even still dangerous and can lead to burns, not to mention the red-hot exhaust pipe itself. A few centimeters away from the tailpipe, though, the fumes could be called pleasantly warm.
  • Feeling the warm air on one's skin can feel delightful and comforting, especially at colder outside temperatures.
  • In cold weather, you can often observe how motorcycle riders, for instance motocross athletes during warmup or waiting times, hold their chilly hands in front of their exhaust pipe to warm them up. One hand in front of the exhaust pipe, the other twisting the throttle to rev the engine, is just as practical as a heated glove!
• 💨 Blast: Or the "puffing" of the exhaust. Exhaust fumes don't pour out of the exhaust pipe steadily, they come in bursts. The lower the engine speed, the more distinct they are. This rhythmic throbbing of the stream of exhaust gas can also feel very nice. It also makes the engine feel almost like a living organism, more warm animal than soulless metal machine.
  • Two-stroke engines, with their usually smaller displacements and running at higher revs, blow out their exhaust in quicker, gentler puffs. You have to hold your hand up to the exhaust pipe pretty closely to notice them. It's like a gently vibrating relaxation massage!
  • Four-stroke engines emit their exhaust fumes in slower, but stronger pulses. Standing behind a four-stroke motorcycle, even at a distance of a meter or more, you might still have to withstand some pretty strong blasts of exhaust pounding your body. It's almost like a pressure massage!
• 👁 Sight: Smoke, clouds and vapours are simply fascinating and entertaining to look at and watch. Unsurprisingly, smoke machines are a popular effect at parties, concerts, and other events.
  • The big and small turbulences make each exhaust fume a unique, constantly changing artwork
  • Right after spurting out of the exhaust pipe, the fumes have a particularly forceful and vigorous shape and dynamic. They shoot out of the tight exhaust opening at high speed and form a straight stream into the air, before slowly spreading or wafting away with the wind. 📷
  • Interplay with sunlight leads to enchanting effects of light and colour.
  • Depending on the type of engine and fuel used, exhaust fumes have distinctive colours. Four-stroke fumes are, if visible at all, a light grey or white. Diesel fumes can be an earthy dark brown, or pitch black. Two-stroke fumes, thanks to the oil being burned along with the gasoline, tend to have a more or less pronounced blue tint – my favourite! 📷
  • As soon as they have left the exhaust pipe, the fumes become less dense and grow bigger. The cloud of exhaust begins to adjust to environmental pressure, and spread out into the open air.
  • With this expansion, exhaust fumes can outright envelop and shroud people, crowds, objects or entire areas. Especially at motorsports events, where souped-up engines are running in a confined space, even a small number of motors can build up impressively huge plumes of exhaust. 📷
  • These plumes are then going to waft away into the environment, depending on the wind. For many of us who are into exhaust fumes, it's especially appealing to see a noxiously blue cloud of exhaust fumes drifting off through lushly green, pristine, untouched nature, or into a forest. 📷
  • Exhaust fumes can build up into a veritably smog. If many motors are running at close quarters, the wind is calm, humidity is high, in bottoms of valleys, in forests, or wherever else natural or man-made obstacles keep the fumes from dissipating, they can accumulate and densify into a thick haze. Because this haze forms gradually, you might not even notice it happening when you're in the middle of it. Only after leaving the area for a while and coming back, you notice how much visibility is reduced, how fine swathes of smoke swirl around, and that the air has developed a blue colour. These pooled fumes can be especially impressive at indoor motocross or karting tracks which allow two-strokes.

Thoughts on harmfulness

While the penetrating smell and the cosy warmth of exhaust fumes puffing out of the pipe are perceived as pleasant by many people, even if subconsciously or only furtively, the optical facets of the last section hint at another group of triggers, which are probably more exclusively appreciated by those sharing my penchants. Because people like me don't just enjoy exhaust fumes because they look pretty, smell nice, or feel pleasant. It's the thought of the actual environmental harm they cause that make exhaust fumes so exciting titillating for me. As a kid, it was the awareness of how devastating exhaust fumes are for the environment that stirred and afflicted me so deeply.

• Exhaust fumes are one thing first and foremost: a toxic cocktail of countless contaminants. Apart from the small remnant of fresh air, there's barely anything in exhaust gas that isn't in some way unhealthy, causing disease, threatening life, and destroying the environment. In a way, exhaust gas is the opposite of nature.
• In contrast to most other forms of pollution, which tend to take place slowly and out of sight, exhaust fumes are very direct, blatant and noticeable. Whoever's producing exhaust fumes can't ignore or hide the damage they're causing the the environment. Exhaust fumes are brazen, blunt, and aggressive.
• Exhaust fumes take effect immediately. Processes such as climate change, or microplastics entering the food chain, can only be observed years after and far removed from their original causes. Exhaust fumes, however, are expelled directly into our air, to be breathed in by any humans or animals in the vicinity.
• The air pollution caused is, for practical purposes, irreversible. Motors constantly soak in fresh air and turn it into noxious exhaust fumes. Many of the emitted contaminants will keep poisoning the atmosphere for decades or centuries to come.
• Exhaust fumes are all-pervasive. The contaminants are deposited on and inside anything they touch. Anyone who ever rode a motorcycle or scooter should know the phenomenon that one's clothes reek of gasoline and exhaust fumes even after just a few minutes of riding. The air turbulence behind the rider is enough to do the job. After a day at the indoor karting track which I used to visit, our hair and clothes were so thoroughly soaked with the smell of exhaust that only a long shower could get rid of it. Even the printed result sheets had an incredibly strong stench of exhaust gas to them, even though they were just lying around in the building!
• People are completely defenseless against exhaust fumes. The moment you notice exhaust gas, you've already inhaled it. People who pollute the environment with exhaust fumes are always polluting the breathing air of all of their fellow humans, leaving them no chance to defend themselves. They're not given a choice. They have to breathe poison, because the fresh air is gone. Not even breathing masks can hold back the pollutants in exhaust gas.
• Exhaust fumes are everywhere. Around the globe, and at any point in time, hundreds of millions of motors are burning fuel and filling the atmosphere with exhaust gas. The noxious clouds are blown away by the wind and distributed everywhere. Nowhere is safe from them. You could have a stroll through a remote forest in a natural preserve, and suddenly notice the stinging smell of exhaust fumes, drifting in from somewhere far away.

Constraints

As explained above, the harm they cause to the environment is an absolutely crucial aspect of my fondness for exhaust gas. If I'm not convinced that the exhaust fumes I see are wreaking real damage on the environment, the key thrill is missing. It needs that exciting tension with evil, the forbidden, and the unforgivable. In certain circumstances, therefore, exhaust fumes leave me totally cold.

• When exhaust fumes are only slightly polluting. This is the case for modern car engines. As a child, exhaust gas bore down on me so heavily because I had to watch this pollution happening while not being able to do anything to stop it. To this day, this aspect of pollution is crucial to my excitement and thrill with exhaust gas. If I know that some exhaust gases are probably relatively harmless, the reaction is lacking.
• Four-stroke engines, for mostly the above reason. At some point as a boy, I learned that diesel and two-stroke engines are many times as bad for the environment as modern car engines. Immediately, my focus shifted almost exclusively to those kinds of engines. Soon, white puffs of smoke coming from a car's exhaust pipe didn't bother me much anymore, considering that I had learned how the little motor scooter next to it, churning a blue haze out of its tiny exhaust pipe, could be contaminating the environment with as much pollution as hundreds of cars.
• Used for a reasonable purpose isn't a hard exclusion criterion, but when I feel that the exhaust gas arises out of some sensible task, much of the appeal is missing. That's why, for example, exhaust fumes from factories don't do anything for me.
  • If petrol-powered machines and tools are used at some worksite, the exhaust fumes excite me more the smaller the amount of work the tool seems to save. A steam roller does a job that would be pretty difficult to do otherwise. But a string trimmer can spew out ungodly amounts of exhaust fumes, without being much less of a strain than just using a traditional scythe.
  • The more frivolous and irrelevant a reason for using a gasoline engine seems to me, the better. A scooter stuck in traffic is less exciting than one which is being idled and revved unnecessarily for minutes before even riding off. A jetski is less interesting when it's used by beach lifeguards for their job, than when tourists are using it to just have some fun out in the ocean. Taking the example of a motorcycle, the thrill increases from when it's being used for the daily commute, to when it's used for short distances out of pure laziness, to joyrides with no particular destination – up to the absolute pinnacle of motorsports, where gasoline is being burned simply to ride around in a circle and have fun. 📷
  • If the person causing the exhaust fumes feels bad about it, my excitement is also reduced. As a boy, my emotional reaction was always most intense when people polluted the air with seemingly complete indifference, or even wilfully, and that's still the case today.

Key experiences

My earliest memories about my complicated relation with exhaust gas is that I vigilantly paid attention to the exhaust pipes of passing cars. As early as when I was still in kindergarten, I carried little pieces of paper on which I tried to jot down license plates, along with a rating of how much (visible) exhaust gas the car produced. My scale went from "none" to "little", "some", "a lot", up to a final rating which could be translated as "darn much".

Around this time, I must have started discovering certain functions of the body. For some unclear reason I must have, at the same time, been thinking about this terrible pollution which I was observing almost every day. From that point forward, thinking about those vile exhaust fumes, and picturing them in my head, seemed to be somehow connected to those pleasant feelings. I couldn't have known what those feelings were all about. I started consciously memorising any scenes of air pollution that I witnessed and thought were particularly bad, so I could visually remember them later on. Right now, I can only remember one of those early "materials" with any certainty.

• Concealed construction. I was waiting at a bus stop with my mother. On the other side of the road was a construction site. A protective screen blocked the view of the construction site, but I could hear the work going on behind it. Suddenly, I saw a dark-brown cloud of diesel exhaust shoot up from behind the wall. 📷 The cloud was almost opaque, it must have looked a lot dirtier than all the exhaust fumes I usually saw. The filthy cloud slowly rose up and dissolved. But my torment was far from over. Every few seconds, another plume of thick exhaust shot upwards from behind the screen, like a fountain, or water shooting from a whale's blowhole. I remember clearly that I wasn't able to see the offending machine, but I could hear the deep, rumbling noise of the diesel engine. Again and again, the motor roared for a quick moment 🔊 , and one second later, the next cloud of poisonous fumes shot upwards towards the sky. My heart was breaking! That I couldn't see who or what was causing the pollution somehow made it worse. I couldn't see what they were trying to accomplish, all I could see was the horrible effects it had on the environment. Thick clouds of pure poison which cruelly, mercilessly, and relentlessly rose up into the beautiful, blue sky, and darkened it.

Prevalence

Among all the penchants discussed on these pages, exhaust gas is the one that's almost certainly the most common among the general population. The subsection on sensory impressions in the facets section, further up on this page, outlines a few of the possible reasons.

Liking the smell of gasoline seems to be so common that it doesn't even warrant further discussion. Many people admit to it openly, and don't make anything of it. It gets more difficult with the smell of exhaust gas, but my theory is that this is largely because most people don't distinguish between the very different types of engines. If hearing the words exhaust gas makes someone think about the sulphuric smell of the fumes of a modern car with a catalytic converter, I understand why they wouldn't have much positive to say about it. Quite often, though, people acknowledge – sometimes spontaneously, sometimes when asked – that motor scooters are, for some odd reason, an exception, and actually smell quite nice. I had people admit to that difference who didn't know anything about four-stroke or two-stroke engines. They just observed that a passing scooter has a more pleasant smell than other vehicles.

Of course, it's not easy to find out how universal these opinions are. Sometimes, I'm tempted to think that it might literally be part of human nature to be fond of the smell of two-stroke exhaust gas. Would even the staunchest environmentalists have to admit that, on some primal and instinctive level, they like the smell? After all, the smell isn't something that has been around long enough for evolution to have adjusted our response to it. Otherwise, for our health's sake, we probably would've learned to find the smell of exhaust so terribly disgusting that we'd try to avoid it whenever possible. An interesting thought experiment is whether such a revulsion would have kept us from burning fossil fuels to the point of near self-extinction.

Among the many like-minded individuals with whom I was able to talk about these topics so far, the answer is much simpler: in one way or another, exhaust gas is the one fondness we all have in common. Some prefer diesel exhaust, others don't. Some only like seeing and smelling the fumes, while for others, the greatest pleasure is in twisting the throttle themselves; many enjoy both perspectives. For some, everything stays very much focussed on the exhaust fumes, while for others, it's just one part of their interest in all forms of pollution.

Something that I noticed over the years, though, is how strikingly often someone's background story turned out to have been very similar to mine. For the majority of people with a kink for exhaust gas, this predilection seems to have grown out of a very strong environmental consciousness during childhood. Having felt overwhelmingly helpless in the face of exhaust fumes and pollution, deeply suffering from it emotionally, but then turning it around into a defiant, spiteful, rebellious attraction and finding ways to derive pleasure from it, seems to be a very common pattern.

Another thing I noticed is how much society and media seem to have played a role. I mentioned earlier on that pollution was such a huge topic on my mind because many magazines and TV shows for children were constantly reporting on it. Many of the like-minded people I have talked to online have been born during a similar timeframe (early 1980s to early 1990s). Many have grown up in countries closeby, in Western Europe. Surprisingly many are from the German-speaking area, so have probably read and seen much of the same media. It seems possible that, in trying so hard to get children to understand the severity of environmental pollution, the efforts backfired for at least some kids, making them develop a strong and unhealthy fondness for exhaust fumes.

Connections

So far, no connections to other aspects have been defined.

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