Nope that's how CAFE standards work. You can thank the EPA for that!
Instead of building more efficient small cars it becomes impossible to make them meet the efficiency requirements without making the car cost so much extra through fines. So instead you just get more "trucks" and SUVs. No more sedans! Those are the vehicles killing the planet!
You can thank Congress for that, not the EPA. They were the ones that required the agency by law to create the separate standards for “non-passenger vehicles” and the weight classes, as well as the other loopholes that enable the shenanigans, like allowing medium passenger vehicles to classify as non-passenger.
The degree to which this is broken boggles the mind. The country has a strong interest in reducing fuel consumption and emissions, and the country also has an interest in vehicles being lighter. And the rules utterly fail at both.
I don’t know what the right fix is, but completely abolishing CAFE and replacing it with a carbon tax might be a good start.
Now that chevron deference was eliminated (along with many other long-standing precedents), soon you’ll get to blame political appointees with lifetime positions!
Theoretically this would be a great opportunity for someone to take the EPA to court over this and have a chance of it actually having an effect, whereas before that was unimaginable. Of course it will require deep pockets, but a coalition of automakers could perhaps make it happen.
Are you saying that the chevron deference elimination allows the courts to overrule congress? I don't think that's the case. I think the courts still can only overrule congress on constitutional issues, the same as before the chevron deference was eliminated.
But then so are the bureaucrats. Hence the ass-backwards emissions policy we have now. The different is courts are compelled to hear well-reasoned arguments from experts on both sides and adjudicate based on their analysis, whereas bureaucrats can and do turn a deaf ear to anyone that doesn’t toe the party line.
Not to mention the flex fuel scheme that GM, Ford and Chrysler pulls. CAFE fuel mileage calculations permits ethanol compatible vehicles to assume that it will be driven 50% of the time using E85 ethanol. For the worst gas guzzlers, they add the additional ethanol hardware to get the “lower” fuel mileage. Hence you only see the flex fuel badge on big trucks and SUVs. And ironically, the flex fuel label is really a label that it’s a gas guzzler.
Is the limit really 8500 to get into that unregulated category? Small SUVs are very popular and are basically sedans on stilts and weigh a lot less than 8500. So I don’t think you could blame the death of sedans on that rule, if that’s indeed what the rule is.
There are other standards that can put vehicles in different emissions categories. I believe the one that most crossover SUVs target is being considered “off road”, by having four wheel drive and meeting a few ground clearance specifications: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/part-523#p-523.5(b)
The goal of promoting these small SUVs instead of sedans is actually because they’re quite fuel efficient: being in the same category as much larger trucks, they pull up the average fuel economy and take the pressure off manufacturers to make their highly-profitable bigger SUVs more efficient.
GVWR includes passengers and cargo when fully loaded.
8000 lbs is not totally crazy for a delivery vehicle. It probably weighs at least 2000-3000 lbs empty (with batteries).
Imagine a small business that tries to mail ten pound boxes. If they can fit ten by ten per layer in the van, once the pile of boxes is five layers tall, you’re basically at the van’s specs.
Private passenger vehicles is under 10% of global CO2 emissions. Electricity and heating is about 4x. Manufacturing and construction 2x, farming 2x, freight 1x. Repurposed light commercial vehicles would be a tiny fraction of those numbers. I suspect they are not what's killing the planet.
Broken out per-pound, I suspect that private passenger vehicles represent a disproportionate amount of unnecessary global emissions.
Or another way: heating and cooling, farming, etc. are all essential (if not necessarily optimal). Commuting in your own private car is not; one only has to spend 15 minutes on the average American highway to observe that the overwhelming majority of car traffic is one person driving a car that can fit 5 or more.
Sounds dubious considering the amount of CO2 emissions caused by uneaten / wasted food is similar to personal transportation emissions.
I also don't think the idea that we should strive to limit our lives to that which is absolutely necessary to only survive or generate economic activity is valid. To me, my drive to the beach with my dog is more essential, valid, and valuable than your commute to work.
But regardless of whether true or not, environmental destruction caused by CO2 emissions does not care if the emissions were "necessary" or not, by any definition of necessary. So it simply isn't personal light trucks that are what's destroying the world.
There is a simple way to find out what is “destroying the world”.
Keep increasing fossil fuel taxes until the target amount of carbon emissions is achieved. The consumption that goes away is what was “destroying the world”.
>To me, my drive to the beach with my dog is more essential, valid, and valuable than your commute to work.
And this is why efforts to curb emissions and other pollution is hopeless.
Emissions and pollution are a function of energy consumption. Energy = force times distance. Force = mass * acceleration * distance. So you either reduce the mass that is moving (including you, your dog, and your 5+ passenger vehicle) and/or reduce the distance you move, or don’t worry about pollution.
> Keep increasing fossil fuel taxes until the target amount of carbon emissions is achieved. The consumption that goes away is what was “destroying the world”.
You haven't arrived here by any reasoning, you're just working back from the outcome you want. I.e., you want to define "unnecessary emissions" or "least expensive to cut emissions" as what is destroying the world. But if carbon pollution is destroying the world, then any carbon pollution causes basically the same damage to the world as any other. That's the climate and environmental science. When you bring economics into it you're bringing in arbitrary wants, desires, what people inherited at birth, etc., that has nothing to do with the impact to the world of additional carbon in the atmosphere.
Here's a concrete counter-example. If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs. That doesn't mean the meagre eating habits of those now deceased poor people was what was destroying the world rather than the exorbitant consumption by the ruling class that could have been a zoom meeting. In fact both were equally contributing (ton for ton) because the climate doesn't care where the CO2 came from, if it was ethical or economical or necessary or fair or anything else. Either the carbon is emitted into the atmosphere, or it isn't.
> And this is why efforts to curb emissions and other pollution is hopeless.
I think it's only hopeless so long as those pushing it are massive hypocrites. Nobody likes a hypocrite. Nobody likes injustice.
> If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs
You offset the carbon tax with a universal tax credit or refund or UBI or whatever you want to call it. Give people all of the money back that was generated from the carbon tax. Poor people don't fly on private jets or buy yachts so they'll come out ahead. Or at least, less behind than those who do spend money on those things.
You can put a blindfold on and throw lots of darts at the board, sure. I was specifically addressing the idea that economics somehow determines which CO2 producing activity is destroying the world and which isn't. CO2 is CO2.
I don't know what your first sentence means. A carbon tax puts into focus which carbon emissions are truly essential, and which ones are optional, expressed by the spending choices consumers make. If you have it in place and most voters agree with the principle (because they make money) then you move the tax rate slider up or down to get carbon emissions to whatever level is enough.
My first sentence means that UBI doesn't change anything to somehow make the offered definition of what kind of carbon pollution is destroying the world valid.
"Essential" doesn't mean anything to the physics of climate change, it just means something like "what people choose to do".
> Here's a concrete counter-example. If you raise carbon price, virtuous billionaires and politicians will continue to fly their private jets to climate conferences while more people starve from increased food costs. That doesn't mean the meagre eating habits of those now deceased poor people was what was destroying the world rather than the exorbitant consumption by the ruling class that could have been a zoom meeting.
You going to the beach with your dog in a big pickup truck, along with a couple hundred million other people, is the same level of non essential as people flying in private jets (of which there are very, very few).
People in the developed nation’s middle/upper middle class like to think they not consuming multiple standard deviations above the mean, because they don’t fly on private jets, but they do.
> But if carbon pollution is destroying the world, then any carbon pollution causes basically the same damage to the world as any other. That's the climate and environmental science. When you bring economics into it you're bringing in arbitrary wants, desires, what people inherited at birth, etc., that has nothing to do with the impact to the world of additional carbon in the atmosphere.
Yes, obviously any fossil fuel tax that meaningfully reduces consumption has to create a floor for quality of life, such as a minimum level of nutrition, shelter, healthcare, education, etc. The amount of wealth redistribution necessary to get there very well might make it so many people cannot (regularly) drive to the beach in a pickup truck with their dog.
The fact that increasing gas taxes in the US is a political nonstarter should indicate how much we (the broad voting populace) value our standards or dreams of consumption, which are multiple standard deviations above the mean.
> You going to the beach with your dog in a big pickup truck, along with a couple hundred million other people, is the same level of non essential as people flying in private jets (of which there are very, very few).
Again, whatever level of nonessential you claim it might be and however you measure that, is irrelevant to what is destroying the environment.
Did you not take anything from the previous comment I made? The fact that your idea of "non-essential" means that poor people starve to death while rich people fly around in private jets to parties and vacations. Do you acknowledge that was wrong, or at least proved that the economic measurement of "essential" that you invented is totally arbitrary? I don't see how you can just keep going on without acknowledging this and addressing it.
This isn't even close. Cars globally emit 4x as much CO2 as the global fleet.
You might be referring to sulphur emissions, which are much higher for ships because they are basically unregulated, while car fuel has virtually zero sulphur.
Interestingly, that used to be true, but in the past few years some regulations have gone into effect regarding sulfur emissions in cargo ships.
I think that was probably a good thing in the long run, but there's some evidence that the sulfur particulate matter was "hiding" some of the warming we "should" have been seeing based on our CO2 emissions, because global warming has spiked a bit as sulfur has decreased.
You’ve literally made the point. How many boats are there? Compared to cars? My guess is we as a species don’t have anywhere near 1/4 the number of cars as boats worldwide. I would be flabbergasted if the number of boats (with motors) was even 1/10 the number of cars.
Boats pollute massively and it’s a shame considering that water is a much more efficient medium of transportation thanks to buoyancy.
> Boats pollute massively and it’s a shame considering that water is a much more efficient medium of transportation thanks to buoyancy.
It’s a good thing people don’t use container ships to commute every day, then…
Seriously, comparing the effect of one car to that of one ship is not even remotely useful. Cars would be much better if they were used by more than one person on average. At which point we could even scale them up and operate them among fixed, predictable routes at fixes, predictable times.
Anyway, no, they really are not making your point. Comparing the emissions of the global shipping fleet to that of all the cars used to commute every day tells a lot about where efficiency can be found. Sure, some shipping is frivolous, but then a single person (or even two people) commuting in a light truck is beyond stupid on every level.
Yes but this is not some incredible realization. Cars transport individuals (up to a family) whereas these enormous ships are the backbone of global shipping and commerce. Not to say they can’t run cleaner but this comparison is pointless.
Careful: People often confuse CO2 emissions with NOx emissions when discussing ships.
The main concern with big ocean vessels is that they burn fuel "dirtier", as opposed to cars which--in most countries--are already subject to emissions standards and mandatory catalytic-converters etc. because people got tired of smog and acid-rain.
On a pure CO2 basis, ships may actually be the lesser-evil in terms of payload/distance, lack of alternatives, etc.
Would you like to explain how the transportation system with less emissions per kilogram per mile is causing more harm than one of the least efficient forms of terrestrial transport?
Instead of building more efficient small cars it becomes impossible to make them meet the efficiency requirements without making the car cost so much extra through fines. So instead you just get more "trucks" and SUVs. No more sedans! Those are the vehicles killing the planet!