Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to A comment from the middle class.

Exactly
Larry J — (archived)

There are over 100 million vehicles on America's highways. In any given year, maybe a few million cars get scrapped and several new million get sold. Millions of people can't afford to run out and buy a new car, or even one built within the last several years. All of the new technologies and government mandates you can think of do nothing to address those existing vehicles.

I don't have a link to the existing numbers but I've read that cars built in the before the mid 1970s give off about 400 times as much pollution as modern cars. Even cars built well into the 1980s have much higher emissions than modern cars. If we want to seriously reduce air pollution, perhaps it'd be more effective to find a way to get those old polluters off the road. After all, for each one of those we "retire", we're reducing the pollution far more effectively than cutting new car's emissions by another few percentage points. However, that comes back to the point you raised - what about the people who can't afford a cleaner car? What about the people like you who need a bigger vehicle due to family size or job requirements? It's easy for the elitists to say people shouldn't have big families but that does nothing for the children already born.

Would it make economic sense to buy up those old cars at a price high enough to allow the owners to buy something cleaner? Probably not, because market forces would then drive up the cost of the cleaner cars due to supply and demand.

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