When you have an administration run by pinheads who haven’t spent much time outside government, you get things like Cash for Clunkers.
According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The program’s first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that’s a pretty big mistake.
According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), automobiles are almost completely recyclable, down to their engine oil and brake fluid. But many of the “Cash for Clunkers” cars were never sent to recycling facilities. The agency reports that the cars’ engines were instead destroyed by federal mandate, in order to prevent dealers from illicitly reselling the vehicles later.
The remaining parts of each car could then be put up for auction, but program guidelines also required that after 180 days, no matter how much of the car was left, the parts woud be sent to a junkyard and shredded.
Shredding vehicles results in its own environmental nightmare. For each ton of metal produced by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of “shredding residue” is also produced, which includes polyurethane foams, metal oxides, glass and dirt. All totaled, about 4.5 million tons of that residue is already produced on average every year. Where does it go? Right into a landfill.
Meanwhile, of the 250 million cars on America’s roads, Cash for Clunkers swapped just 690,000. Of those, many were relatively young and fuel efficient, so we didn’t save all that much gasoline.
Even better, Cash for Clunkers drove used car prices up by shrinking the market. So it hurt the environment and it hurt people who usually buy used at the lower end of the market. Hint: They’re not rich.
The two rules of liberalism.
1. whatever they say is a lie
2. whatever they do makes things worse
“For each ton of metal produced by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of “shredding residue” is also produced, which includes polyurethane foams, metal oxides, glass and dirt”
Apart from the glass (which is debatable), would any of that have been recycled otherwise? Is there a big polyurethane foam recycling industry? Does the dirt usually end up being shipped in bags to gardeners? Are those metal oxides a sought-after commodity?
It was an industry stimulus, no more and no less. A less expansive program was mooted here in australia at the last election. It never came to pass (or my car would have been worth more than it is). The environmental benefits were never justifiable – it was only ever going to be an economic stimulus. That said, I have a friend at the federal department of transport who thought it was a good idea on safety grounds – it would have got a lot of 15+ y/o cars (worth less than 2000$) off the road.
If it is never enviornmentally justifiable, then don’t tell me and the American people that is for the enviornment. That’s exactly what was done.
I really don’t think that’s true. You might want to remember it that way, but it was _always_ meant to be an economic stimulus with some small advantages in improving fleet mileage.
From whitehouse.gov:
“The Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) is one of several stimulus programs whose purpose is to shift expenditures by households, businesses, and governments from the future to the present. (Other programs with the same motivation include support for bringing forward future infrastructure investments, and accelerated depreciation to bring forward business investment.) Such time-shifting is valuable in a recession, when the economy has an abundance of unemployed resources that can be put to work at low net economic cost; even conservative economists such as Martin Feldstein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) under President Reagan, have endorsed this logic for stimulus spending. The benefits of such expenditure-shifting programs are particularly clear when the induced spending is in an industry (like the automotive industry) with a disproportionately large amount of unemployed resources. An additional benefit specific to the CARS program is that bringing forward the replacement of dirty (high-polluting) “clunker” motor vehicles by cleaner, high-efficiency vehicles means there will be less pollution over some time period.”
http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/CarAllowanceRebateSystem
You’d be quite right to say that the program didn’t cure cancer and never brought peace to the middle-east. But nobody ever said that it would.
from your own quote:
“An additional benefit specific to the CARS program is that bringing forward the replacement of dirty (high-polluting) “clunker” motor vehicles by cleaner, high-efficiency vehicles means there will be less pollution over some time period.”
The reference to polution is specifically an environmental reference, so yes – they were promoting it on environmental grounds as well.
As a secondary consideration, yes. There were also potential safety advantages. They never claimed that either of those were the objective, they said it was an economic stimulus with some environmental benefits – specifically, that the cars replacing the clunked ones would be more fuel efficient, overall. And they were correct.
The guv DIDN’T claim that it was (to quote HK) “for the environment”. It was an economic stimulus measure, and it wasn’t marketed as anything else.
You can very easily say that it was a failure if you invent claimed benefits which were never met. Like I said, it didn’t cure cancer either.
Just goes to show you that Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ theory works!