Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to re: The spice must flow.

bend over Hummer, fill 'er up
ER — (archived)

Remember when they decided to clean up tailpipe emissions and save the world from pollution? There are two ways to go about this, either you make everybody drive small cars that use less gas (if you use half the gas you get half the pollution) or you stick a gadget on the tailpipe that eats half the pollution, but that makes the car use even more gas. It's pretty clear what the lobbying in Congress favored.

So we spent a fortune redesigning gas stations and reformulating fuels so they'd work in this gadget. Of course, the latter costs are passed on to the consumer anyway; that and the costs of administering the whole system. This strategy has several advantages, it allows us to continue marketing big V8 gas hogs unchanged, retrofitted with converters because that's where the profit is, not in econoboxes. It also puts Volkswagen beetles out of business, and sends all the Europeans and Japanese back to the drawing boards because their little cars simply couldn't work well with the new converters, not enough surplus power.

But the Japs and Euros re-engineered their cars and were able to meet the new standards without sacrificing fuel economy, and while they were at it, they also managed to build bigger, luxurious cars that were fun to drive and nice to look at, at a really reasonable price. A true triumph of a free market. So our car industry, unable to compete, went down the tubes, bellowing "too much regulation and government interference".

Of course, today, the Japanese and the Europeans are selling us big V8
gas hogs at outrageous prices because that's what the American market wants, and that's where the profit is, not in econoboxes.

Oh sure, you can still buy econoboxes, but you have to be really committed to the concept and very resistant to the advertising campaigns designed to sell you, big, profitable, V8 gas hogs.

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