Carl Fisher wrote:
I'm sure you know a lot more about cars than I do, Donnie. But can you give me an example of what you're talking about? It seems to me our cars are more gas-efficient than ever before, burning as lean as possible and making tons of power for their displacement as well. Are you saying that cars would get even better gas mileage if car companies weren't also required to worry about SOx and NOx emissions? That sounds potentially complicated to figure out which course would be worse for the planet overall. But since we're already on this course, I'm not too wistful for the other one.
It takes work to clean the emissions in the system. That work has to come from somewhere, and the cleaner you want it, the harder you have to work to get it. I'm not technical enough to provide an explanation on how it all works, but suffice it to say that the cleanliness of your emissions is not simply thanks to an increase in efficiency in burning things. It's a LOT of factors combined, with a few of them being thanks to greater efficiency (like direct injection, which is relatively new) and many of them not (like catalytic converters, which while getting pretty good at what they do still rob power).
While we are finding ways to be more efficient, go check what the 70's smog crap on cars did to fuel mileage. We probably guzzled through TRILLIONS of barrels of oil thanks to what amounted to pretty bad smog controls that also killed mileage to boot.
But, all that said, perhaps having the fuel scare NOW will lead us to work harder NOW to rely less on the stuff we won't have. Of course the counter argument is that had we not bothered for longer and thus not used up more of the precious resource, well, we'd be able to work on finding the resolution to the running out problem later when we're generally more technologically advanced.
It's all a bunch of "we don't really know" and I'm generally in favor of doing what we can to reduce the emissions. But I think in some ways we go overboard on this one tiny area (cars) when that money could be better spent on other things that might help more. Humans are some pretty hefty CO2 producers.
--Donnie
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