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Cars are net positive.
Edit: ignoring global warming because it's really hard to quantify. Just comparing deaths to global productivity increase because of cars. Cars are a net positive.
Edit 2:
Clarification - it's hard to quantify the direct relationship of cars to global warming. Duh there's a relationship, but I really don't want to have a debate here. Ignoring that factor for a moment, net value of productivity of cars vs productivity lost by some deaths. Yea. Let's compare that.
It is easy to illustrate that carbon dioxide, the major byproduct of internal combustion found in most car models today, causes global warming directly. If you look at this graph, you'll notice that solar radiation spans a large range of wavelengths of light. Most of these wavelengths of light get absorbed by our upper atmosphere according to chemical composition of said atmosphere, except for certain wavelengths in the UV region of the spectrum (that's the part of th... (read more)