Posted on 01/05/2013 10:32:34 AM PST by grundle
recent reports indicate the entire program may have actually hurt the environment far more than it helped.
According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The program's first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that's a pretty big mistake.
According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), automobiles are almost completely recyclable, down to their engine oil and brake fluid. But many of the “Cash for Clunkers” cars were never sent to recycling facilities. The agency reports that the cars’ engines were instead destroyed by federal mandate, in order to prevent dealers from illicitly reselling the vehicles later.
Shredding vehicles results in its own environmental nightmare. For each ton of metal produced by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of “shredding residue” is also produced, which includes polyurethane foams, metal oxides, glass and dirt. All totaled, about 4.5 million tons of that residue is already produced on average every year. Where does it go? Right into a landfill.
E Magazine states recycling just the plastic and metal alone from the CARS scraps would have saved 24 million barrels of oil. While some of the “Clunkers” were truly old, many of the almost 700,000 cars were still in perfectly good condition. In fact, many that qualified for the program were relatively “young,” with fuel efficiencies that rivaled newer cars.
And though the point was to get less fuel efficient cars off the roads, with only 690,000 traded in, and over 250 million registered in the U.S., the difference in pollutant levels seems pretty negligible.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Everything 0bama and his regime come up with seems to reflect his simple-minded approach. No wonder he has no clue on economic matters.
You are right it had absolutely nothing to do with the environment. It was a payoff to his UAW contributors, nothing more.
Yet another in a long line of proofs that the government fouls up everything it undertakes. Central Planning always fails miserably when it comes to allocating resources, whereas markets are genius at resource allocation.
All of this was obvious before it even went through.
It closely r
esembles the “broken glass” theory of economic recovery. Send a bunch of thugs around the city throwing rocks through the windows. This will provide more jobs for glass makers, putty makers, window installers, etc.
Only trouble is, it doesn’t work. It’s not production, it’s waste of good resources for no gain.
Was NYC in better shape during the Dinkins administration, when there were broken windows all over the city, and drug addicts stripping copper pipes out of abandoned apartment buildings throughout the South Bronx? Obviously not. Giuliani proved otherwise, and even Bloomberg understands better after going through that experience.
This was never a program about the environment. It was about the redistribution of wealth. It was about reparations. The government prints up new money and gives that money out in order to buy votes four years down the road. These people get value in free money which was basically stolen from the value of money already held by everyone else. The Clash for Clunkers program has been extended to EBT, Disability, and FHA loans [sic].
Just another support mechanism for the UNION RUN car industry. It was absurd.......
The big-government/big-corporate criminal complex considers the market for used vehicles to be an infringement upon their monopoly. Eventually they will simply outlaw it.
It also hurt a priceless American culture which the WH swine hates with all his muslim perv self.
Just another support mechanism for the UNION RUN car industry democrat party
I kept thinking how many poor people could have used those crushed vehicles.
You know, they do some fancy and complicated maths down there in the Congress and the White House, but you'd think that they'd realize that a ton is 2000 lbs and 500 lbs per ton is TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT! That's a lot of residue.
True, and numbers without at least 9 zeroes at the end are too inconsequential to worry about.
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