Will you please stop idling your car?

By design, many environmentally degrading behaviors occur where you wouldn't really look — far away in the tar sands of northern Alberta, or seven miles beneath the ocean floor, acting like termites gnawing at your very foundation. Idling one's car is more like the stink bug, sitting out there in broad view. I don't know for a fact that the guy with the Denali keeps his whole house at 64° all summer long, but I can see him in the emergency lane at Foodtown, sharing his exhaust as he waits for the Popsicles — it's hot out, after all!

As with so much, the harm is not in the singular act, but in the accumulation. According to the Department of Energy, Americans waste 6 billion gallons of fuel each year to go nowhere. Engine exhaust irritates and inflames the respiratory tract and is particularly harmful to children, who breathe faster and inhale more air per pound of body weight. We grieve that, globally, seven million people have died from COVID-19, though as many as 10 million people die each year from air pollution.

Back at Foodtown, I've come to see this as an opportunity. When else can you find your intended audience just sitting there, unable to delete themselves? By now, I've approached more than 200 cars, often the ones lined up for school pickup. About 80%, upon gentle provocation, are willing to shut off their engines. Many of them don’t even know there’s a law against it.

Anti-idlers, like those in my local Clean Air Collective, have worked to pass a smattering of laws, but the fines are rarely enforced. Is it too petty? Is it too invasive? There have been a variety of reporting schemes, including New York City’s famous Citizens Air Complaint Program, which theoretically allows anyone with a camera to report offending trucks and recoup a quarter of the fine. We can debate whether idling is a collective problem or an individual problem. Or, we can act — simply by pressing a button or turning a key and shutting the motor off.

Here’s what happens when you do that: On a 50-degree day, your cabin temperature will plummet from 70° to 65° in 15 minutes. On an 80-degree day, if you find shade, it will rise about as much.

Just like household climate control, car purchases, and hot sauce preference, idling is another purely elective behavior, another way to distance reality from what it is to what it is for me. So, it, too, relies on collective action. Toward this, I find writer Ezra Klein's words to be helpful: “Don’t think about consumption — even your consumption — as an individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion.”

I struggle — as an educator, a father, and a consumer — between two truths: We desperately need to speed up our response to the climate issues that are making lives harder even now, yet we know that selling this as a bunch of sacrifices is not going to work. We need something more convincing, and we need to construct this response together. I can’t think of a more important use of a classroom or a town hall meeting.

But for the time being, as we welcome once again the miraculous procession of spring, the least we can do is turn off the engine, open up the window, and breathe the collective air.

This guest essay reflects the views of Tim Donahue, a high school English teacher who lives in Westchester County and writes about climate change and education.