Natoma said:
Quite frankly the most important point in your post. My question to you is, why weren't the CAFE standards increased in 2002 when we had the chance to reduce greenhouse emissions in the strongest polluting sector of our economy?
SUVs were created by CAFE. The original CAFE was poorly drafted and contained a loophole that allowed car makers to create a new class of car that is built cheap and unsafe like a truck, avoiding car-based emissions standards, but to be marketed to consumers as a car -- the SUV. Oh, since it's cheaper to manufacturer, the profit margins are higher, but consumers pay more, because it seems to be more flexible than a car. Wonderful! That's the problem with regulations is that they often have a paradoxical effect. Rather than causing manufacturers to make more efficient vehicles, CAFE led them to produce more inefficient vehicles.
The technology exists today to implement hybrid cars, yet the only american firm that has hybrids hitting the market within the next fiscal year is Ford. The rest are at least 3-5 years away. Why? Because they spent all their time building and perfecting the 10-15mpg SUV while the Japanese spent their time building and perfecting the 30-40mpg SUV.
Not the complete story. The missing component: Over 300+ patents held by Japanese car makers on every aspect of Hybrids, causing Detroit to pay a big royalty on every hybrid made. That's why Detroit is hoping to leapfrog this generation (hybrid gas cars are a stop-gap) by going straight to full electric (hydrogen/fuel cells). GM alone is investing billions to "rethink" the whole way cars are designed and built, to make them more like PCs, manufactured more like the way Dell builds PCs.
Honda and Toyota made the "right bet" by going hybrid early because gas hybrids are easier to manufacture and fit into the existing worldwide fossil fuel distribution chain nicely. But Detroit's investments might eventually pay off by 2010. Think of some of those expensive SUV profit margins going into R&D.
But you're right, technology exists to make cars more fuel efficient (I'm not sure if it makes them safer), but that won't happen if SUVs are so lucrative to manufacture. Of course the car manufacturers are resisting CAFE changes, since the first CAFE steered them onto a profit bonanza.
Imo this seems to be the best way to improve our fuel efficiency as a whole, because the majority of our pollution output comes from our use of fossil fuel powered transportation.
I agree, and since Honda worked out how to economically produce hybrids on the same production lines as regular cars, I'm sure others will follow suit, and you will see millions of hybrids on the highways in the next few years. But now Detroit has a perverse incentive. Since they put most of their investment into hydrogen, any change to CAFE is going to be perverted. If they are forced to give up the SUV profit bonanza, you can be sure they will try to sabotage and disadvantage Honda's hybrids with changes to the law that tilt the balance towards hydrogen.
Anyways, this is getting away from the point of the article, which is to show that voluntary cooperation from corporations has failed rather miserably
Yes, but I hope you realize that mandatory cooperation can also fail miserably, as CAFE demonstrated. Regulations have to be very gradual (not radical), and carefully crafted to prevent perverse incentives.
p.s.: I understand what you are saying wrt the increased technological sophistication of our descendents in 100 years. But really, what happens in 100 years when they say, "Oh well, in 100 years, the people after us will find a way because they'll be even more technologically advanced than we are."
The point is, if in 100 years, Washington D.C. is threatened by the ocean overflowing Potomac and turning the whitehouse into a swamp, the technology and wealth will be there to deal with it. It won't be catastrophic. Venice is dealing with it's slow sinking. Seattle dealt with it's "below sea level" problem, as did Holland, and in 100 years, it will be even easier for rich nations to deal with global climate problems.
Our capacity to deal with the problems today will be dwarfed by our capacity to deal with it in 100 years. Imagine if your grandfather 100 years ago saved $1 in the bank vs spending it on a political speech against industrial pollution? Today that $1 would be enough to feed, shelter, and educate hundreds of people in the third world, or to pay a big chunk of cost for resettlement or new construction. Now imagine if the industrial revolution was slowed 100 years ago? We'd be MUCH WORSE off now.
Today, global warming is not a problem for us, it is *potentially* a problem for the inhabitants of the year 2100. If the inhabitants of the year 2100 have to spend $10 trillion to fix the problem, it will be but a small fraction of their wealth and capability. Today, the costs are something like $1 trillion for us. How could that $1 trillion be better spend, and how will it compound in 100 years of benefits? See to me, if I had to spend $1 trillion GDP of the world's economy, I'd rather spend it on education, food, and clean drinking water for the billions in poverty, who are likely to be the next big polluters and who are responsible for the population explosion.
If in 2100, the inhabitants of the earth decide not to do anything and let those of the year 2200 take care of it, it must be because in 2100, global warming wasn't causing significant problems. If it becomes a crisis in 2100, they will have to deal with it. Either way, I don't see the problem.
Even the most dire predictions of global warming seem to me as pretty benign and don't justify the hysteria. I'm frankly more concerned about global instability, proliferation of weapons, and another couple decades of poverty and repression for billions. I think it's far more likely our economic and political future will be destroyed by instability than by the slow onset of climate change. Thus, I'd like to spend most of our extra resources combatting fundamentalism, instability, proliferation, since I think we'll blow ourselves up before we choke ourselves with pollution.
That is not the way to deal with these long ranging problems imo.
But spending trillions without doing a proper cost benefit analysis is also not the correct thing to do, and it is by no means certain that it is cheaper for us now to tackle the issue, than to pocket the money, grow it, and tackle it in a few years. Our technology and economy is growing faster than the rate of climate change, so our ability to "deal with it" is evolving faster than the size of the problem with have to deal with.
It makes sense to promote efficiency, since it compounds growth and increases resources for all. It makes sense to try and nudge corporations when the technology is within the realm of the feasibile and becomes proven. It however, does not make sense to impose blanket caps on production or to push industries before they are ready.
You only hear about technocratic successes from Asia, but do you study their collosal failures, like Japan's MITI predicting that Japan would be a petroleum superpower and pushing their industry to invest heavily in it (and NOT cars/consumer electronics), or MITI funding the utterly stupid "fifth generation computing project" which blew billions and produced nothing.
Of course, my all time favorite is supersonic, and then, hypersonic transport, funded in the 70s and 80s. Oh, that was going to be big.
