California Carbon

Since the 1970s, California has claimed a unique exemption to EPA pollution mandates, and has been able to enact stricter regulations due to “special topographical, climate and transportation circumstances.”  The Bush administration is claiming that California doesn’t need to put in their stricter CO2 standards and should instead just go by the federal regulations, and has refused to let California and 16 other states put in their stricter standards.

The Bush administration, at least on pure legal grounds, has a decent case. The Clean Air Act waiver was established because California needed to enact stricter pollution guidelines due to the lion’s share of the car pollution was being emitted in a coastal basin abutted by high mountains that ten million people live in.  The rather unique circumstances of the Los Angeles basin call for California to have their own stricter pollution standards.  The same argument, however, can not be made with CO2.  Even if a massive amount of CO2 is emitted in the LA basin, it doesn’t meaningfully affect the quality of life in the basin.  CO2 doesn’t get trapped up against the hills like lower lying smog or sulfur dioxide.  In short, CO2 emissions concentrated in a single area won’t make life in that area uniquely misreable.

This is all academic, however.  The Bush administration isn’t making this judgment based on the reasoning I just described.  It’s because they really don’t want to have strict CO2 emissions standards, and since California is the state that buys the most cars, they can effectively set industry standards with their rules.  And as far as CO2 emissions standards go, they should be national and much higher.

Zen and the Art of Stick Shift Driving

Slate’s Lantern — which examines whether certain behaviors are environmentally sound — takes a look at the manual transmission. Manual transmissions, it turns out, can realize something around 15% mileage efficiency gains, assuming that the drivers are proficient in not letting the revs getting too high and coasting whenever possible. As a manual devotee, I think this is important information to spread, but the benefits of stick shift driving are much more expansive than being more gas-efficient.

The first is, especially as a teenager, the feeling of superiority you feel by driving in a much more sophisticated manner than 90% of drivers. Of the all the drivers at my school, only THREE drive stick shift cars. Ergo, I can feel superior. There’s also the feeling of accomplishment after one learns how to competently drive a manual transmission. The first few attempts are universally awful, with stalling, the clutch making horrible noises and the awful smell of a poorly treated transmission. But once you figure out how to start on a hill without rolling back, you have a real sense of having learned to do something that’s both difficult and useful.

Even more importantly, manuals are just more fun. One has more control of the car, and by controlling the revs and being able to do things like downshifting, freeway driving and passing is just more enjoyable. Though I haven’t seen any statistics, I have to imagine that those who drive manuals are safer.  This is probably for a few reasons.  The most obvious is that people driving manuals are just better drivers, or else they wouldn’t go through the trouble of learning how to drive like a gearhead.  The second more speculative reason is that having to work the clutch makes one more attentive.  When you’re driving stick, you can’t ever space out, you must always be attentive to what gear you’re in and where the revs are, and since its hard to disaggregate driving attention, this leads to being more attentive to what’s actually going on the road.

The final reason stick shifts are sweet is the possibility of achieving a Zen like consilience with your vehicle.  After enough time driving a manual transmission car, you are able to shift at the right time without looking at either the revs or even what gear you’re in.  You can deduce when to do everything by feel and sound.  You feel the car straining too much, you know that when only these two gears are even possible at a certain speed, and thus know when and how to shift.  The best comparison I can think of is Luke is flying into the Death Star at the end of a New Hope, when the ghost of Obi Wan Kenobi tells him to “use the Force.” Luke then turns off his computer targeting program and shoots the proton-torpedoes into the Death Star using only the force as his guide.  Luke Skywalker would have driven a stick.

NOTE: I realize my last paragraph clashes with the one before, but just roll with it.

My Way To Save the American Car Industry…And the World

Americans don’t like small cars, traditional ones like the CRX are often looked at as starter cars for the financially marginal and certainly not for a (small) family or a well off individual.  One of Ezra’s commenters points out that it’s different in Japan and Europe where “Small cars…are outfitted much better (more expensively and more profitably) because they’re seen as the family car, and not as basic transportation for recent grads.”

In so much as there are small cars sold in the United States, there is some sort of gimmick to elevate them over a standard, larger vehicle.  Toyota’s Scion brand is putting a premium on good design and stylish, functional accessories. BMW’s A series, which is coming to the US soon, will be the best performing small car on the market, while the Prius has an advantage from it’s high technology and consumptive virtue derived from buying it.  If gas prices are getting higher, and small cars are going to get more prevalent, US companies are going to have to find a niche.

My suggestion is diesel, or even better, biodiesel hybrids.  Diesels get better gas mileage, and their emissions and noise issues have been mostly fixed.  Even better, biodiesel is essentially carbon neutral — the carbon that’s emitted from burning the fuel is the same that’s taken in during the photosynthesis of the plant matter. Make it hybrid, using GMs new hybrid technology , and you’re likely to get better gas mileage than Priuses and the like due to using diesel instead of normal gas.  Also, we should all be driving plug-in biodiesel cars eventually, and if GM could do a big roll out, they could change American attitudes towards diesel and small cars and make them more palatable for an American public.  Of course, if GM were a rational entity, they wouldn’t have all these different brands, but that’s a story for a different time.

In a Fresh Pair Of Steps and My Best Foreign Car

What is a perfect American car?  I don’t want to bag on Garance specifically, so it’s unfortunate that her post had to provoke this rant, but here it goes.

Quality Overwhelms Cost

Eric Alterman takes Mickey Kaus to task for not mentioning the German cars are also more expensive due to union imposed costs:

Hello, Mickster, if you want people to consider you intellectually honest, you might mention health care there, which is more expensive than the things you mention and covered in every single industrialized nation save this one. And Mickster, do you complain about the work rules and extra costs to finance BMWs and Mercedes? If so, I’ve not noticed …

Alterman would have a case here if it weren’t for the fact that most American cars are competing with economy/non-luxury/non high performance Japanese cars not German ones. The union imposed price increases hurt American competition at the low end, in the 18-30K range of cars - Focus v Civic or Accord v Fusion. Not only are the Japanese cars better designed, but they’re also cheaper. American car companies can’t hope to compete on quality, and union contracts make it impossible to compete on cost. The reason Kaus doesn’t complain about German cars is that they make up a luxury market that they dominate - there is no real American competitor to a BMW 3 series - their only competition is other German cars like the Audi A4 and MB C class. If they all have the same union labor costs, than it isn’t that big a deal, seeing as German cars essentially make up their own market. So there you go, Kaus is being intellectually honest. Miracles happen folks, just got to keep your eyes open.