Let's Pay Detroit To Bring Their Gas-Sipping Cars Home To The U.S.A.
by Susan Kraemer - Dec 3rd, 2008
Who hasn't been enraged to read about how Ford and G.M. can make perfectly good little gas sippers for Europe, but just can't bring themselves to make a fuel efficient car for us back home?
Well, now that they need some funding from us, here's an idea. Let's fund Detroit just to set up their efficient European car factories — back here, where they are really needed. Let's get some better gas mileage out of their money troubles.
Apparently, it only costs $75 million to completely retool a plant, to produce an efficient little car instead of the gas-guzzling behemoth they were fobbing off on us fools all these years.
Detroit needs money, and we need efficient vehicles. Let's make a deal: We taxpayers will provide the funding to retool their factories to build just the specific models that are in the Common Good. We'll fund retooling to build any models that help solve the climate crisis by getting better than 50 mpg, right now. It's a win-win.
To make it super quick and easy, let's forgo NHTSA crash tests on their current European models that already we would die for. After all, that EU is such a nanny state, right, and these gas sippers already passed fussy ECE rules to meet European requirements. Surely those sissy foreign crash-tests are good enough for us back here in the wild wild west: let's accept their foreign rules. Some hardy soul here has demonstrated that small light fuel efficient cars are actually safe enough.
Our NHTSA crash-testing requirements have kept fuel efficient imports out for decades. And not just fuel efficient foreign cars. Even our own "foreign" cars.
It's time to just tear down that wall. This would be a quick and easy way to reduce our heavy carbon footprint. Allowing ECE rules could be achieved with a quick stroke of the legislative pen once our first real working majority finally moves in next January. Then all we'd have to do, fellow-funders, is decide which models to fund first to finish fossil fuels fast.
Me? I'd go for any old Ka that gets 56 mpg.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
First published at Gas 2.0 by Susan Kraemer
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Replace the management in Detroit
What I would like to see is the mangagement of the big three replaced by people who actually acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. What we have now is the number 2 man at GM appearing on the Colbert Report show, to talk about the Chevy Volt, and then saying he knows of 32,000 leading scientists who are global warming skeptics. This claim is absurd, if he means climate scientists. If he is not talking about climate scientists, and that has to be the case, then he is just misleading the public. The total number of climate scientists in the world is probably in the ballpark of this number, and 99.9% of them agree with the IPCC. So how is he coming up with 32,000? Pulling them out of his a....? He must be including the phony list put out as the Oregon Petition, which has been proved to be a hoax perpetrated by someone who thinks the more CO2 we pump into the atmosphere, the better life on earth will be. They even used forged
National Academy of Science stationary to get scientists to mistakenly sign this piece of trash. The group behind the Oregon Petition does not include a single climate scientist.
How will Detroit change if the people in charge think like that?
Perhaps this anectodal story will illustrate the point.
from http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/11/8/1227/22627 posted by Andrew Dessler
"A journalist friend recently sent me this:"
"I just got my "Journalist's Guide to Global Warming Experts" from The Heartland Institute in the mail. They list four "experts" in Texas. It's an awesome list. ...
Robert Bradley, energy expert.
H.Sterling Burnett, policy analyst
Dr. John Dale Dunn, emergency physician
Michael Economides, petroleum engineer
"As you probably know, the Heartland Institute is one of the world's premier climate denialist organizations, so you can be pretty sure these guys reject the mainstream scientific view.
Notice anything odd about the list? Despite the fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of reputable climate scientists working in Texas, the Heartland Institute is unable to get a single one of them onto their list. Apparently expertise is not required to be an expert for Heartland. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you can repeat the following phrase -- "the climate stopped warming in 1998!" -- you qualify.
This reinforces a point I've been making for a while: there are a few credible scientists who dispute the basic message of the IPCC. But not many. You can probably count them on your fingers and toes: Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Spencer, Christy ..."
Sen Inhofe's list of 400 skeptics that he raved about on the senate floor was just as dubious.
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