text: Our excessive car usage is dramatically hurting our environment.  In fact, "...Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe... and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States" (5).  What people use for our short term convenience is actually proving inconvenient for us in the long run.  In Paris, there was "147 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter compared with 114 in Brussels and 79.9 in London" (17).  The culprit?  Diesel fuel emissions from transportation (cars).  To underscore the severity, the smog in Paris is so bad that French Officials had to limit car usage in a smog cloaked city that "rivaled Beijing, China, which is known as one of the most polluted cities in the world"(14).