The most obvious cost of detached homes is the completely unsustainable amounts of infrastructure required to maintain them. Roads, sewage, electric, etc.
It’s a well documented fact that suburbs of sprawling suburban homes are bankrupting towns/cities all across America and only the densely built downtown cores are keeping these cities afloat because the tax revenue of dense mixed-use areas is substantially higher than the cost of maintaining the infrastructure for these places. Check out Strong Towns if you’d like to know more and see the studies showing all this.
It’s satire, pointing the cognitive dissonance that allows people to recognize that fumes are deadly but never question the fact that our entire “modern” concept of city planning is built around constantly being in and around the machines that produce these fumes 24/7.