[jambutty]

Although the toxicity of the pollutant must be taken into account, so must the volume.

You don’t need a degree to figure out that 20 cigarettes produce far less volume than one vehicle ticking over for one hour. Lets be really generous and suggest that one fag will produce 10 litres of smoke, that is 200 litres for a packet of 20. Even if one fag were smoked after another it would still take at least 100 minutes to smoke the lot. Lets be generous again and say one hour. In reality it would be one day.

Let’s keep this simple and take a 1 litre car as an example. By definition a 1 litre car will expel 1 litre of gasses for each engine revolution. On tickover the engine revs will be around 800 rpm. That is 800 x 1 litre of gasses every minute. During an hour that will be 48,000 litres of noxious fumes. But cars don’t sit around ticking over, they bomb around at, at the very least some 4,000 rpm or more and there are millions on the move at any one time. Granted there are millions of smokers still but on average each one will only smoke 20 fags in a day.

So smoking will produce 200 litres of smoke in one hour whereas a car at the absolute minimum usage will produce 48,000 litres of exhaust fumes in the same hour. It’s not rocket science.

Someone please remind me again which is the greater polluter?