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The Spectacle Blog
Cash for Clunkers an Environmental Bust
Enviros end up trashing the environment with wasteful “Cash for Clunkers” program.
The Obama administration knows how to waste money in style. It lavished taxpayer funds on the “Cash for Clunkers” program, paying people $4500 to turn in their old cars (which were to be destroyed). The idea was to increase the demand for new cars; it would have been better just to have written checks to Government Motors and the other auto companies. At least the program would have been simpler and less subject to fraud.
One of the many delightful consequences of the program was to increase the cost of used cars. Which, of course, most hurt people of limited means, who were more likely to purchased “previously owned” vehicles. Not that that would much bother members of the administration or Congress. They made enough not to feel the pinch.
A number of smaller used car dealers also went out of business. Just not as much stock to sell. But then, why should that be a concern of Washington?
Now comes a report that the program was an environmental bust as well. It seems that destroying cars isn’t particularly environmentally friendly. Explains freelancer Andri Antoniades:
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.
The remaining parts of each car could then be put up for auction, but program guidelines also required that after 180 days, no matter how much of the car was left, the parts woud be sent to a junkyard and shredded.
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.
Oops!
Well, never mind. All that matters is good intentions, and no doubt the second Obama administration will have a lot of new initiatives that will work out better!
View all comments (10) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Doug Bandow
http://spectator.org/blog/2013/01/12/cash-for-clunkers-an-environme
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Bob K| 1.12.13 @ 9:15AM
I heard that they all ended up in China with all of our other scrap metal!
China needs all it can get for it's new fleet. They call it a "war effort!" Don'tcha know!
Bob Grant| 1.12.13 @ 9:55AM
That's 700,000 usable/affordable vehicles not available to obama voters. Eat it!
More Hopey/Changey coming soon....
fmm| 1.12.13 @ 10:41AM
There are never good intentions in a government program. It is all about power and control and making money off the citizenry.
RJ| 1.12.13 @ 12:34PM
FMM - you should be awarded with the Nobel Prize in economics for your insight.
RJ| 1.12.13 @ 12:32PM
When liberals such as Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama think economic prosperity can be enhanced by destroying property, it is not surprising that their simpleton solutions end up with additional unintended (?) consequences. One of the big problems with liberals in charge, as we can again see with the new push for "gun control" is that they push an agenda rather than thought-through solutions.
chuck| 1.13.13 @ 8:52AM
Because liberals can't and don't think. They "feel".
RJ| 1.13.13 @ 3:48PM
Thanks for the correction. Yes, I should have written liberals feel economic prosperity can be enhanced by destroying property. Yes, with liberals it is all about emotion; not a thought based on what works.
Sean| 1.13.13 @ 4:04AM
Liberals want us all taking buses or trains.
chuck| 1.13.13 @ 8:53AM
Nope, they want us to walk or take a bicycle. Of course if you ride a bike, you have to wear one of those gay government approved bike helmets.
Digitconserv| 1.13.13 @ 7:42PM
When this was first coming down (a project of the egregious "Green Czar", Van Jones, who soon after went under the Obamazoid's bus for being a 9/11 troofer?), I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the energetics:
I.e., BTUs in/out of energy costs of shredding a clunker, recycling its steel content, factoring in the manufacturing energetics of producing new vehicles, and finally comparing fuel consumption of an undestroyed clunker through its remaining lifetime vs. the fuel saved by the earth-friendly replacement vehicles (predictably, the majority of clunker cash-out beneficiaries actually bought light trucks and larger SUVs, which offered little if any mileage improvements!).
Ten minutes of Googling and arithmetic would have showed the program to be conceptual failure from the outset, in its every environmental and energetics aspect.
Also --considering that the administration was just then pushing through Obamacare, it was stunning to look at those online videos of plenty of very nice cars (Corvettes, SAAB convertibles, to name a few) running through their death throes in real time as the silicon carbonate poison pills added to the crankcase seized up their engines-- it seemed all to evocative to me of what they had in mind for grandma, once the calculations of her late-life healthcare needs were run through the Obamacare alogorithms by the armies of newly hired healthcare apparatchikis. Bad, bad, optics. These highly-positioned jerks were utterly clueless!