Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? This comment wasn't substantive to begin with, and the part about downvoting and "triggered" is not acceptable. Then you perpetuated a flamewar and broke the guidelines repeatedly below.

We've had to ask you many times not to do this. Eventually we will ban you for it, so please just refrain, regardless of how right you are about diesel.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't downvote you, in fact I read your comment after your edit. You are complaining exactly about behavior you yourself just did: you made an assertion and didn't explain in what way or cite sources, simply "diesel saved millions."

I didn't know I had to point out something that obvious and when asked I actually answered.

And guess what, when I actually answered I was downvoted for that too.

Here is the thing: to you it is incredibly obvious. Despite the clear feedback that other people don't agree, you still insist it is incredibly obvious. To some people it is incredibly obvious that AGW is real; to other people it is incredibly obvious that AGW is a scam.

Just asserting it doesn't advance the conversation, and copping an attitude about something so meaningless as karma points is ridiculous.

How have they saved millions of lives?

How many people do you think where brought to hospitals. What do you think the machines that build the hospitals were used for? How do you think we build damns, roads, buildings, how do you think power generators work and I could go on. Expand that to fossil fuels in general (medicine, concrete, asphalt, pesticides and thousands of other products)

Blaming diesel for a public health crisis is like blaming the sun for melanomas or the wind for wrecked ships.

Yes using diesel has consequences just as fossil fuels does but the upside of them far outweighs the downside and not using it would be far worse.

Not really the same as the sun and the wind. We can certainly use other fuels; its simply a choice.

Of course it's the same

Things can have both positive and negative properties. Diesel is no exception and has certainly saved more people than it killed.

Its facetious to compare forces of nature that we have to live with, to a simple choice of fuels that we don't.

Diesel is ... cheap that's about it. Everything else about it, is a negative.

If you actually read what I wrote you would know that's not what I did.

I already gave you just some of the positive effects of using Diesel luckily everyone can read for themselves.

Likewise, reading what I wrote would reveal, I don't regard Diesel as inevitable as the sun and the wind. That was a disingenuous comparison.

That's all on this subject.

Nice strawman. I didn't claim it was. So yeah you kind of exposed everything about your intentions here. Thanks for that.

"Blaming diesel for a public health crisis is like blaming the sun for melanomas or the wind for wrecked ships."

Putting diesel in the category of 'sun' or 'wind' is pretty clear I think.

Then you should think it through some more.

The point is that it's absurd to only look at the negatives. Just like you wouldn't only be judging wind or the sun on negatives you can't only look at the negatives only of diesel you have to look at the positives and THEN decide whether it's worth it.

Perhaps others could attempt to be more clear, if they didn't mean what they actually wrote.

How is that related to diesel vs petrol?

Why would using petrol be "far worse"?

Well if you care about CO2 petrol is more than that.

And if you care about NOx and other pollutants diesel is more than that, which is what the article is about.

It's about a public health risk. Which needs to be contracted by how many lives it saved. Thats the only way to look at this if you want to assess whether it was a good or bad idea in the first place.