For me the emission issue is wrought with short sightedness. For legislators, regardless of party or state affiliation, they have no common sense. For them, trading in for a new car every year that is a little less polluting avoids the facts that more pollution from energy usage and processing is done every year making new cars than the little bit that they "save". When I was running for the State Rep a few years ago, in one of the "debates" that was held at the University with a large # of professors present I challenged them. I used a 1976 Caddie Eldorado as the example and challenged them to prove that the Eldo would have polluted more in the intervening years, if maintained, than the amount of pollution generated producing newer cars for the same period. I used specificly a known gas hog and suggested that if the owner of said car had bought a newer, less poluuting vehicle every 2 years that they would have created more pollution generating the replacements and disposing of the older ones than the Caddie would have. Not one person challenged it and 10 years later I have yet to hear any data. But it is not just cars. We produce plastic bottles and then "recycle" them, where at one time we made bottles from glass and sterilized them. Our whole "pollution" mentality is flawed. As we worry about the cost of
oil, think about the fact that 30 million barrels of
oil a year are used to produce the bottles that designer water is sold in. Think about that the next time some tax employed yo-yo is lecturing on the need for this or that while sipping from their plastic water bottle. So much for environmental concerns. We have scrapped a true recycling industry, glass bottles that were used in virtually every drinking substance from Milk to beer, and now have a total loss system. Until there is a fundamental change in the Philosophy of pollution we will continue to be under the iron fist of legislators and bureacrats.