From the article:

"Peak hour, drive alone commuters from Clark County, Washington have average household incomes of $82,500; and 75 percent of them are white, non-Hispanic. More than two-thirds of Tubman students are people of color; and half the student body is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price meals."

This lacks several points from being conclusive:

- it describes only "peak hour, drive alone commuters" without apportioning the fraction of total pollution caused by that group.

- How much does evening peak rush-hour pollution affect school-day air quality? (morning peak would probably have a direct effect)

- by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution - it could be that the majority of the pollution is caused by lower-income commuters driving older vehicles, but Tesla-driving higher income commuters drive up the average income

- it assumes that the money paid for the pollution somehow belongs to the students, when it is apportioned from the tax dollars paid that fund the school district budget. Maybe those dollars already come from the high-income commuters.

- it brings in race purely to add to the emotional content of the narrative

If you disagree, please describe why you find this narrative rationally compelling.

Hmm, not sure this is the best debate strategy:

"I destroyed one of your points, and I could foresee myself doing the same with the others if I bothered to answer them. Therefore it's invalid for you to raise these questions."

I'd also point out that you didn't actually address any of the questions listed. A general study about American vehicles as a whole being single occupancy doesn't imply much of anything about this particular case, hence "by dealing with averages, it obscures the distribution", which you demonstrated with your response, rather than undermined.

TIL average household income of ~82K, about ~41k per parent, is "rich"

Agreed, that's a bit "rich" :p

However, we mustn't forget that there are families living on 41K combined (two parents @minimum). Or 20K (single mom @minimum).

80K is far from rich. But quite comfortable compared to many, many, Americans.

Wealthier ppl have new cars with stricter emissions.

In fact, gasoline cars since port injection have made negligible amounts of particulate emissions (which is the only pollution that matters in this case, CO2 are only globally important). Direct injection might screw everything up soon (their intake valves foul like crazy).

The emitters, therefore, are ppl with old cars; tractor trailers; city buses [0]; working class ppl driving, old ill maintained vans and pick ups.

Really, the only significant particulate emissions I can think of from rich suburbanites are their gas mowers and blowers. But they're (a) polluting the air around their homes (b) quickly switching to electric.

Now, if you want the rich sub-urbanites to pay to relocate the school, that's cool. I'm down. But they're really not the problem.

[0] In my mid western city, at least, the buses are diesel powered and not LNG, and they appear to have the particulate filters ripped off. Dunno about Clark County's buses in particular.

> Why are we assuming the commuters are rich?

I don't know the particulars in this case, but in the mid 20th century it was a very common strategy to run main arteries into the city through the poor & ethnic inner city neighborhoods (not to mention tearing those neighborhoods down and destroying their communities for "urban revitalization"), hence the historical assumption of poorer city residents dealing with the noise & pollution of the rich suburban commuters. As time goes on this will become less and less true thanks to America's urban renaissance, but still property values near expressways tend to be much lower due to the noise pollution & air pollution.

Interestingly, the most high-profile American expressway failure (in Manhattan) gave rise to one of the most valuable urban regions in America. I personally doubt this is a coincidence.

Car ownership is innately expensive. Between regular maintenance, the cost of fuel, insurance, inspections, and the aggregated costs of getting a replacement every ~10-20 years you are easily spending several thousand dollars a year in vehicles even if you try to be optimally frugal about it. Most people are easily over 10k a year in car expenses, especially on some of the ludicrous commutes people on the west coast put up with.

If you have never met them consider yourself upper crust, but there exists a substantial population in the US and all other western countries of those who can not afford a car. You often don't see them because it turns out traveling any substantial distance from your often impoverished neighborhood without functional public transit or private car ownership can be quite prohibitive.

So even the guy driving the "clunker" car down this highway is still probably in the upper half of wealth in the area, easily, assuming they are actually affording to inspect, license, and insure themselves and their vehicle. A lot of people don't, but its a bit egregious to try to count people breaking the law driving on the road in the first place as contributing to the average wealth of the drivers on said road.