Enviro-whinerism is that philosophy (corrupt inner circles of advocacy, plus franchise and ad hoc ventures) and dialectic (expendable asset holy warriors brandishing torches and pitchforks) condemning every form of progress. Enviro-whiner Luddites (its clergy - with expense accounts) and hind gut fermenters (the peanut gallery - giving of their wallets and shoe leather) squeal a trinity of ecological righteousness: expensive, shoddy, and deadly. Airbags boost a car's price about $2500; kill kids and "small" women, spontaneously detonate (2+ million car recalls), cause monstrous injuries of themselves; and their pound of explosive propellant sodium azide is as toxic and soluble as potassium cyanide. Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), Enviro-whiner gasoline oxygenate, raises gasoline prices, lowers obtained gas mileage, and is an EPA priority carcinogen now found in all water supplies. One Officially wonders how MTBE in every drop of water you drink got there.
We turn to the Royal School of Mines, London, and its refereed technical house organ, Analyst 123 451 (1998). Your car's exhaust train catalytic converter costs $500-700 dollars and drops gas mileage 5-8% (expensive), does nothing a well-made engine and clean fuel supply would not realize (shoddy), and is now shown to nanogram/gram precision to have contaminated the First World with toxic effluvium (deadly). Enviro-whiners are beside themselves with joy. Perhaps every car should have two catalytic converters, or ten.
The English study confirms and expands data from the United States, Germany, and Sweden. Heavy transition metal dopants used as the active catalyst elements erode from converters and exit tailpipes as sub-micronized dusts, accumulating in the world, being inhaled and ingested by people (and fragile and endangered Giant Flying Vampire Toads). Road maintenance workers exhibit relatively massive blood levels compared to the First World's general population, which in turn has substantially elevated levels compared to people starving in Asia or Africa. First World dusts and soils are rich with the nasty stuff.
What are the toxic effects of platinum metals? Official Truth says massive metallic platinum is harmless, from wedding rings to obsolete platinum haptics of human-implanted intraocular lenses. Ultramicroscopic metallic platinum aerosols have never been bioassayed, and soluble platinum salts are potent kidney toxins (including cis-platin and related cancer-treating poisons). Catalytic converters hold an unregulated smorgasbord of metal salt-doped high surface area ceramic honeycomb. Poisonous jetsam rich with platinum, palladium, rhodium, and other desperate efforts of car manufacturers bending the limits of technology to Enviro-whiners' paper whims have replaced moderately harmless hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions. We did it to save our children. It says so right on the package. We have complex computer models to prove it. What answer would you like?
A singular nicety about light element (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur) chemicals in normal auto exhaust is that Nature rapidly degrades them, having had five billion years of practice with forest fires and such. Torch your heavily over-insured warehouse filled with unsalable inventory and smoke, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and assorted volatile organics and oils rise into the atmosphere, react with the whole world plus sunlight, and return as simple and useful constituents of the normal biosphere. The largest scale sooty burn in Earth's history - Iraqi torching of Kuwaiti oil fields as an IR-targeting countermeasure during Operation Desert Storm - burned 10% of the entire planet's annual petroleum consumption in surprisingly few square miles of area. There was no detected upshot downwind, not even by folks paid to discover charcoal broiled steak kills pregnant women and Furbish louseworts, even after all the data was "corrected."
Saddam Hussein also loosed the largest (totally unremediated - do-gooders dislike bullets) petroleum spill in all history, into the Persian Gulf. That fragile and endangered shallow warm salt water environment, home to untold species hovering at the brink of extinction, sucked it all up without a belch. The multi-$billion Exxon Valdez "cleanup" sterilized everything it touched. Said local biome is still species-depauperate a decade and more later. Enviro-whinerism kills.
Heavy metal contamination does not vanish like duct tape left outside in the sun for a year. Lead smelting emissions by Romans are forever tattooed into Gaia's otherwise undisturbed hide, notable in Arctic and Antarctic ice, ocean sediments, tree rings, and at the proper stratigraphic levels of untilled soils. The same toxicity arguments that removed lead from fuels, and justifiably so, are equally pertinent to catalytic converter emissions.
Like airbags killing innocent women and children to save people too stupid to buckle their seat belts, like MTBE giving you real cancer to avoid notional environmental effects of a few ppm more of carbon monoxide in winter auto exhaust, so catalytic converters have transformed a minor nuisance into permanent jeopardy. Expensive, shoddy, deadly - all flail Enviro-whinerism!