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...a 0.1% reduction in car emissions is much better for the total environment then if all emissions were eliminated from leaf blowers, lawn mowers, construction vehicles, etc.

A slight bit of critical thinking would do you a world of good.

A slight bit of researching the issue is also a great idea.

Motor scooters with 2-stroke engines pollute about three orders of magnitude more than a modern gasoline car. There are enough of these scooters that in many cities they are now a worse problem than gasoline cars yet they remain barely regulated.

Two-stroke scooters are a dominant source of air pollution in many cities

Scooters: Europe's Pollution Machines

If the scooters by themselves are enough to be a problem, it can only be worse if we add up all the 2-stroke engines of all sorts.

I pretty much hate 2-stroke engines. I am in favor of allowing them where nothing else will do, like professional chain saws. But modern battery tech has gotten to a place where an electric scooter ought to be a practical replacement for a 2-stroke scooter and I'd like to see the 2-stroke scooters aggressively taxed or outright banned.

Also, I am now very dubious about the value of additional restrictions on cars. If the goal is to maximize the net benefits to society, then it's better to take old clunkers off the road than to have the new cars pollute 0.1% less.

It's literally true that one old clunker pollutes more than dozens of new cars. (A study found that the worst 25% of cars produce over 90% of pollution!) If you can get clunkers off the road, and their owners start driving anything even remotely modern, it's a huge win for air quality. Making new cars more expensive will only encourage people to keep their clunkers running as long as possible, so I am dubious about anything that makes new cars more expensive. Is it better for new cars to cost $3000 more each but pollute 0.1% less? Or is it better to leave the standards alone, let the car makers get their factories well set up to make cars to that standard, and let the costs of new cars gradually fall over time? My gut instinct says the latter is preferable.

I first started thinking along these lines when I read this essay in 2009: https://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

On the other hand, if the government forces insane emissions standards, the only way to meet them will be electric cars. So companies like GM that make the minimum number of electric cars they can get away with will be forced to make more electric cars. So maybe it's better in the really long run?

Just as I'd like to ban 2-stroke scooters I would like to see aggressive taxes on old clunkers that make them no-longer-affordable to run. However, I am well aware that the burden of those taxes would fall on the poorest people in our society. That's a problem. But it's also a problem that old horribly-polluting clunkers are exempted from emissions standards.

P.S. I don't actually care if the Trump Administration wants to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. If it's the right thing I want to stand back and let it happen. IMHO, leaving standards where they are is the right thing.

I recall how in the eary 70's emmissions standard were going to destroy the automobile with engines getting terrible gas mileage, and no power.

It's true that engines have come a long way since the early 70's. It's also true that back then, most people didn't imagine just how far it would be possible to go.

However, I think we really are running up against some hard limits here. You can keep ratcheting the laws upward but at some point it really is impossible to comply.

In my opinion, the best way to clean up the air is to look at the whole system and try to get the area under the curve to shrink. The strategy being pursued by the Obama administration is to demand the cleanest engines they can get away with demanding, even if this makes cars more expensive; combine that with a sucky economy and new cars are selling more slowly. That means that older cars are staying on the road longer. I would favor a strategy of leaving the standards where they are, or possibly even easing them just a little, and watching competition float the cost of a new car downward a bit. Less-expensive cars means more cars being sold means more clean cars being driven.

At the same time, we need to get more serious about punishing drivers of really polluting old cars. This disproportionately punishes the poor, as for the most part only the poor will be driving the really polluting really old cars. I read somewhere that the nasty blue smoke from just one of those old cars is polluting like three dozen new cars; I just Googled for a reference on that, and while I didn't find one, I did find this: 25% of cars produce 90% of car pollution

Suppose a car is 99.7% clean. Suppose that you could force the car company to make the car 99.9% clean, but the cost of the car would go up $3000. Would you do it? I'm not sure I would, but the Obama administration I believe would go for it.

Those cheating VW diesels emit too much pollution, but they are much cleaner than older diesel cars. It is a better deal for me if my neighbor gets rid of his old diesel and buys a new cheating VW diesel. Even better still if he gets one of the cars that doesn't cheat, but those cost more.

I hate it when I see an old "beater" car go by with a noxious cloud of blue smoke coming from the tailpipe. I would love to see all those cars off the road. To speed up the process, stop making new cars more expensive.

P.S. I can't take credit for the idea of looking at the effect of the cost of new cars on the total behavior of the system; I got the idea from this blog post.

P.P.S. I look forward to electric cars becoming common. If electricity is cheap and electric cars are cheap, pollution will drop even more.

If you really want cleaner air, the best thing to do would be to get as many old cars off the road as possible, so that people will be driving new cars. The new cars are so much cleaner than the old cars, it's amazing.

With the above in mind, I don't think the government should tighten up emissions standards even more. All the easy gains are gone, and now it takes engineering and expense to make cars pollute even less, which means that cars will be more expensive. If the government forces all the cars to be cleaner, all the cars get more expensive so it's fair as far as car makers go; but making new cars more expensive means people are more likely to keep driving dirty old cars.

There is a good discussion here: http://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

Thus, while it may seem counter-intuitive, I believe the best way to get the air cleaner is to leave the standards right where they are and try to get the cost of a new car to drift downward.

The new cars are much safer than the really old cars also, so getting more people into new cars will also save more lives than making the crash standards tougher.

I think that within 20 to 30 years, the majority of vehicles will be electric anyway, and emissions will be very much reduced. (The reason I think that: improved solar technology and new storage technologies will bring down the cost of electricity; and battery costs will come down, especially due to the Tesla "giga-factory". I know I'd be happy with an electric vehicle, and rent a gas vehicle for my occasional long road trip.)

The current policy of the US government is to require the car makers to achieve the very highest fuel economy currently believed to be possible.[1]

Given that car makers are scrambling to try to achieve the best fuel economy, they will embrace a straightforward way to save nontrivial amounts of drag. Backup cameras are already going to be manadatory, so they can just add multiple cameras at once in the redesign.

Since they all will want this, Congress will give it to them.

[1] Personally I think this is stupid. The new cars are already incredibly efficient and clean, so the US government should be pursuing policies that help the car makers lower the costs of cars and sell more of them. Requiring car makers to push the envelope adds cost... it's fair in some sense as all the car makers must add cost equally, but the result is that people will nurse their old clunkers that much longer. Go for area under the curve... go for as many new cars on the road as possible. Jack the taxes up a bit on old clunkers.

http://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

I know, taxes on clunkers are a "regressive" tax that hurts poor more than rich. What I really want is a tax on cars that pollute a lot, AND for the new cars to become more affordable. Make the polluting cars cost more, make the new cars cost less, and thus encourage junking more clunkers.

Just one old car belching blue smoke is equivalent to like 3 dozen new cars in pollution.

Actually, people aren't just choosing between a 30MPG car and a 50MPG car. There is a whole spectrum of choices, and one of the choices is just to keep the old clunker car going one more year.

Any new car will have dramatically lower emissions than an old clunker, and better mileage. In fact, one old clunker can emit more junk into the air as two dozen new cars. And burn lots of gas while doing it.

The new cars are so clean and so efficient, that it will require drastic engineering to make them even cleaner and even more efficient. This will cause new cars to cost at least $2000 more.

Given this, the most rational plan would be to let the car maker keep building the current efficient and clean cars, and hope the price will fall and people will buy more of them and retire more clunkers. However, the policy of the Obama administration is to require new cars to be as efficient as possible, and never mind the increase to the price sticker.

IMHO this is an insane policy, but it is the policy we have.

http://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

A big problem is that the people driving clunkers tend to be poor, and if you take away their clunkers you will cause them real hardship. I don't favor an outright ban. The best policy would be to create favorable conditions for new-car prices to get lower, while at the same time jacking up the tax on gasoline. Jacking up the gasoline tax would jack up the price, and that would hurt the poor, but it would hurt them less than banning clunkers. The idea is to make it financially less attractive to keep running the clunker and financially more feasible to get a newer car.

All this assumes that climate change is a real problem. If it isn't, leave the poor alone. (But tax cars that emit horrible pollution, like blue smoke, cause I don't want to breathe that stuff)

Keith Hennesey is an economic policy expert who worked for President George W. Bush. He wrote a very informative blog post about President Obama's CAFE announcement in 2009.

http://keithhennessey.com/2009/05/19/understanding-the-presidents-cafe-announcement/

If you accept that President Obama is a true believer in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, then it makes perfect sense that he would require the highest efficiency numbers he possibly could. (President Bush, not so much a CAGW believer, chose the "maximum net societal benefits" baseline.)

I am wondering how this new announcement compares with the "technology exhaustion" baseline.

I'm also wondering how a 54.5 MPG standard will impact prices and what the result will be. When new cars are more expensive, people try harder to keep old junker cars going, so if you make new cars more expensive you may keep people from upgrading to newer and more fuel-efficient cars. Making new cars as expensive as possible may reduce overall fuel efficiency of the cars actually in use.

steveha

In at least one case, the only reason given not to sign was that it didn't extend the debt limit enough to cover past the next election. You don't like that link, how about this one. Obama bears full responsibility for his demand that the debt limit increase be large enough to last until 2013.