5 stars for cleaning up our air but what about the rest of the world? (Page 3/3)
82-T/A [At Work] SEP 07, 01:48 PM
I'm all for maintaining a cleaner / healthier environment for everyone... especially because as the population grows, the more desirable land tends to be in areas that are more ecologically diverse (and more important to save). I had a conversation with someone a few days ago who was frustrated that we don't just drain the Everglades and start building more homes to reduce the cost of home ownership in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. The thought was... "Why do people who live there, have more right than people who want to move there?"

I cannot argue with why someone wants to be there, but life isn't always equal. There are people who live in Martha's Vineyard, and Chappaquiddick, who got in back in the 40s and 50s when it wasn't very expensive, and no one really wanted to live there. Just kind of the same thing. Nature's resources are limited, and to an extent, we have to protect them.

For clean air, etc... California does take it to an extreme. On the question, "to what extent," I'd have to say the limit is where it begins to negatively affect the economy... beyond that of other states. To that point, the federal government does a pretty good job of regulating emissions. If I'm not mistaken, the United States has stricter emissions laws than even Europe on gas-powered vehicles. At least, it was this way a decade ago. I don't think that's bad... but Florida has no emissions and safety inspections. They eliminated them because they realized all it was doing was creating undue hardship on the poor and lower middle-class, and new cars already had progressively better emissions. So, they came to the conclusion that having a safety and emissions program was merely causing more harm than good.

The U.S. Government has a long history of making poor decisions ... as in, mandating bad decisions for the auto industry, usually due to lobbying. This is frustrating. Perfect example are the charcoal pellet catalytic converters. They're far less efficient than the honeycomb converters (which were invented before the charcoal pellet ones). But the U.S. mandated the charcoal ones, and this dramatically reduced engine performance, which meant that cars were in effect burning MORE gas to perform the same actions. It was wasteful. Rather than focusing on improving efficiency, the decisions actually heavily restricted engine performance, which just made engines have to use more gas to do the same task. I'd have to say that the early to mid 2000s was probably peak efficiency for engines. Most cars had completely eliminated EGR systems, becuase the computers and emissions systems were able to work better without them.

I guess what I'm saying is... we should all be working smarter when it comes to vehicle regulation and emissions requirements. Most of the regulations we now have on cars today, is to protect us against pickup trucks that are currently unregulated. This all has to do with the power of lobbying. Truck can still have bumpers, where as cars pretty much look like eggs today. There's so much unnecessary stuff being added to cars now that it increases cost, increases waste, and reduces efficiency due to the fact that the cars weigh significantly more.


Don't get me started...
IMSA GT SEP 07, 07:01 PM
Living in this pathetic state, I'll just say that there's a huge difference between the residents of California choosing to keep the air clean or the shitty governor and his greenie hippy mentality FORCING us to clean the air or else. Huge difference.
THAT is what tips the scale of staying, or moving to another state.

[This message has been edited by IMSA GT (edited 09-07-2024).]