Old Clunkers

In the Wheels section of yesterday's Toronto Star there were several articles about "Going Green". One in particular, "Clearing the air on Clean Air Act" [link to full article] caught my attention.

There are lots of interesting points and perspectives in this article, too many for me to give them justice in this entry, which is why I am not even going to try and rather just pick one point 'for discussion'. It was presented in this article that the major source of car generated pollutants is not from the number of cars, but the age of the cars, specifically those cars that are more then twenty years old [aka: the clunker].

There are...more than 1 million 1987 and older vehicles still in service in a total vehicle population of 18 million...removing just those 20-year-old and older vehicles would immediately accomplish [in terms of smog and CO2 reduction] what it will take 24 years to do by focusing only on new vehicles.

This then got me to thinking about ways that the owners of these clunkers could be encouraged to turn in their cars for new [or slightly newer] ones.

Unless the car is considered 'a collector's item', I suspect that the primary reason people are holding on to these gas guzzling, undependable and temperamental [especially on the coldest days in February] cars is because they cannot afford to buy a new one. If this assumption is correct, then the solution lies in the all mighty dollar.

What if, rather then encouraging/legislatively forcing car manufacturers to spend millions of dollars on developing cleaner technology, some of that money was diverted to enable the manufacturers to offer significant 'trade in' value for the pre 1987 car, thereby making it feasible for the owner of the old clunker to afford a new car.

Through my oversimplified rose coloured glasses I see allot of benefits that could come from this:

• these environmental demons are removed from the roads


• the car manufacturers get a bunch of new customers [does that not in someway help with job creation and the economy?]


• the car owner now has 'dependable' transportation, thereby making their world a little bit better

While my suggestion does seem terribly simple, and there are still lots of details that would have to be hashed out, there are some smaller scale examples of this approach working with recent Canadian campaigns encourging people to retire their old lawn mowers, air conditioners and 'beer fridges'.

If you are interested in more information about these exisiting programs please check out the Every Kilowatt Counts site.