Super Eco

Photo credit: sarah gilbert

It sounds so uncontroversial at first. The "cash for clunkers" program would pay an incentive to consumers who traded in a clunker (a gas-guzzler or other old, inefficient car) for a hybrid or fuel-efficient vehicle. There are two competing bills in the House and the Senate, which President Obama has said he supports, would pay between $2,500 and $5,000 toward the purchase of a new car, depending on the age of the clunker and just how inefficient it was. The House version pays more consumers who purchase U.S.-made cars; whereas the Senate version pays more for relatively "younger" clunkers. Both are touted for their environmental responsibility, as well as their side benefit: an auto manufacturing stimulus.

Programs currently implemented in Germany, Texas and California have, indeed, spurred new car sales. Wait, hang on. How is this green? Steven Levitt argues that the incentives are all screwed up; the House version would, he says, encourage car owners to drive their gas-guzzlers longer to reap the rewards. George Monbiot, considering the U.K. version of the program, runs the numbers on how much the government would pay to save a ton of carbon emissions and comes up empty, calling the idea "hand-outs for the car firms, resprayed green to fool the incautious buyer" and deciding "you’d get almost as much value for money by reclassifying ten-pound notes as biomass and burning them in power stations." He points out that the consulting firm engaged to study the program, McKinsey, didn't compare the cost/value of programs meant to encourage public transport, walking or biking, sniping, "a McKinsey consultant wouldn’t be seen dead on a bus."

And who says a car manufactured before 2002 is necessarily a "clunker"? For years, my sister drove a tiny pre-1990 sports car, which got an astonishing 40+ miles to the gallon. Under this program, she could have traded in her car for a new one that was far less efficient, and gotten paid for her troubles.

But it is Robin Shreves at Sustainablog who delivers the real indictment of this program, in a question: where are the old cars going? It seems they will, indeed, be scrapped. And there is nothing at all green about millions of clunkers slowly rusting away, leaching battery acid and ancient oil and God-knows-what-else into our soil. Pay to toss out the old and make a new one instead for marginally better mileage? Isn't that the problem with our throw-away economy in the first place? This concept tells me that our leaders are worse than ever, institutionalizing planned obsolescence. Oh, dear.