The Opinionated Bastard

In the grand scheme of things, a $500 device is going to increase the purchase price of a new car by $1000-$1500. The markup between the cost of a device and the retail price is 2-3 times. So this $500 device is not really $500. Add in the cost of financing a car, and we’re up to $1500-$2000.

Now if a new car costs $1500-$2000 more, people will wait a smidgen longer to buy a new car. Because newer cars are more expensive, older cars will be worth more, so people driving older used cars will wait a bit longer as well. Given that newer cars have less emissions then older cars, that means that basically, everyone will be driving old cars longer, thereby producing more smog then they would have otherwise.

Net result of this magic device? More smog, once you consider even minimal economic effects. 5% for $500 isn’t enough reduction.

Looking out further, once the government “blesses” a technology, that technology tends to freeze. Fighting with the government to validate any improvements that might be made is too much trouble to toke for something that increases reduction by .5% from 5% to 5.5%. . So no more progress is made in that direction because while there might be 100 small changes that could each increase the reduction .5%, none of them are individually worth making.

Result? More smog. Better if the government had left everyone alone.

Sound farfetched? This is exactly what the government did to Coal-fueled power plants in the ’80s with a law that continues to this day. Instead of regulating total emissions, they insisted that all power plants install scrubbers. The problem with this? There’s this technology that to this day would do a better job of reducing pollutants from the coal before it was burned, then scrubbers can do once the pollutants have been burned. This technology? It’s called water. Yep, if you wash the coal before you burn it, it doesn’t put nasty stuff into the air. The only thing good about scrubbers was the name, it sounded better then water.

Even worse, because the government mandates that scrubbers have to operate at a certain percentage efficiency, the power plant industry is basically prevented from washing the coal ahead of time, because then they wouldn’t be able to remove the pollution with their scrubber later on.

Yes, you heard me right, the government is mandating pollution, thanks to the environmental lobby. Nearly all of our environmental laws are setup such that instead of telling people they can’t pollute, they tell them they’re only allowed to pollute a certain percentage. Anchorage Alaska had to add more junk to their sewage in order to take it out so that they could tell the federal government they were reducing their organic matter by 90%. They didn’t have any organic matter before that.

Like another example? Manufacturers of zero-emission cars had to petition to not have to have a catalytic converter on their cars since it wouldn’t do anything. Laws are dangerous, and the lefty approach to legislate or regulate problems away just doesn’t work.

A final example? The EPA mandates MTBE or Ethanol in gasoline in California, despite the fact that the gasoline formulation in California already is required to exceed the federal standards. Since California is a long way from Iowa, they use MTBE, which is harmful to the environment.

The lefty environmental lobby is pissing me off even more these days because they are so used to ragging on coal-fired power plants that they’re ignoring the fact that with a little thought, coal plants could be much cleaner. In fact, the Bush administration is funding a prototype zero-emission coal plant called ZEPS. The environmental lobbies response? They say that coal plants produce greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, ignoring that pretty much anything that burns something produces carbon dioxide. The point is moot anyways, as the ZEPS plant has the ability to sequester most of the carbon dioxide it produces. Coal could become the cleanest way to produce energy.

So I’ve pointed out the problem with the lefty approach, what’s my righty approach?

Basically, you want to set it up so that the market is working for you, not against you. You’ll have to give up your knee-jerk lefty belief that “capitalism is bad”, but it was a stupid belief in the first place. We don’t have “capitalism” in this country, we have “democratic capitalism”, an oxymoron which means whatever we want it to mean. In the case of the US, it means “We can change the rules to accomplish societies goals using capitalism”.

If you give up those beliefs, and setup the rules so that the market works for you instead of against you, you’ll have an entire nation of businessmen and engineers working towards your goals. In the example of a car, you tax emissions and then transfer that money to cars with lower emissions. Buy a car that emits more? You pay more. Buy a car that emits less? You pay less. It is now in the car makers best interest to emit as little pollution as possible.

Same thing with power plants, although with power plants we’ve screwed the pooch so bad we could reduce the allowed emission of pollution ten-fold if we removed the scrubber requirement, while lowering the cost of electricity.

What I’ve been talking about in this rant are just market-based solutions to environmental problems. Interestingly enough, the one environmental organization I know of that promotes market-based solutions like I just talked about, PERC gives out report cards to the presidents.

Clinton? C- Bush? C+

So Bush gets a better grade then Clinton on the environment. If you factor in the fact that they gave Bush an F for opening ANWAR, he’d probably get a B from this organization, yet the left calls him “the worst environmental president ever”.

Please. Pull your head out of your ass. All the left-wing environmental activism is making the environment worse, not better. Capitalism and economics are tools to accomplish your goals, not the enemy.