[Indiantiger]

I saw some dicussion of this earlier, but it seemed to be dismissed. I think that this would be the cheapest and easiest thing to do immeadiately to reduce oil prices now and get people ready for a more difficult road ahead.
Since the US uses so much of the world's oil, I could guarantee that an announcement of this program would immediately reduce oil prices by 20%. They prices would stay there if it was fully implemented in one year.

The program would be a $4B program providing anyone with a car built before 1995, to trade it in for a car made after the year 2000 getting at least 30 mpg. The government pays $4,000. It can be used, new, but has to be made in America. It would pay for 1,000,000 cars and could reduce consumption by 1 million barrels per day. Not to mention reducing emissions substantially.
The program could be implemented in just one year making it quick to implement. Once the intended effect on oil prices was acheived, I would add a $0.10/gallon gas tax AT THE LOCAL LEVEL ONLY. This would be used to provide local incentives on Peak Oil programs from accelerated car exchange programs to other Peak Oil programs.

[azreal60]

Sounds great.( i realized after the fact you can't hear my sarcastic tone here) So tell me, how many cars in america meet that standard? Part of the problem is that made in america cars by and large don't get 30 miles or over a gallon. If you where talking toyota's then sure, those do. But i was watching the ads recently and the fuel effeciant cars they where talking about all where in the 25 to 30 range.

[Daryl]

Great, but wouldn't it be better if the program required people to buy hybrids or plugin hybrids, once they are available? Mininum mpg should be over 40.

[dub_scratch]

This idea is appalling, hideous and completely counter productive.
As they say, if you want more of something, subsidize it. And in the US that had shown itself true with transport, more than anything. The average American drives 150% the mileage of the average European. Why? Because the American government has subsidized the dumbshit box to the Nth degree. Consequently, the US consumes twice the petroleum. Clearly the main factor are the sprawl laws imposed by local governments and the massive subsidies in the form of road construction. The problem is that people drive too much and pay too little for much driving. It is not so much the car they drive in.(see VTPI.org)

The idea to step on the gas of the big government car subsidy machine with this buyback program would be nothing more than a giveaway to automakers. It rewards wasteful corporations and wasteful consumers. The industry that purposely neglected-- or even fought-- fuel economy will now get rewarded with huge government handouts. Car owners who have bought fuel inefficient cars in the past would get rewarded with a huge discount on a new car upgrade. (BTW, I would assume that folks that already have hybrids won't get the same deal. Is that fair?)
This will also be a drain on the American tax payer where the money flows right out of the country. It is quite clear that the cars that the US taxpayer will finance will come from Japan, Germany, South Korea & China. Does this subsidy at the very least go to supporting American jobs? Hell no!

This subsidy is completely unfair to lower income and low milage drivers too (the real energy conservationist). Being that these would be relatively late model cars given the freebee, many of the working poor would be out of the loop because they tend to have the oldest cars. Worse, people like myself who don't drive get to subsidize traffic jams of people that consume much, much more oil. Because of PO, I moved my job from a 50 mile commute to a 3 block one. I now drive a paltry 500 miles a year, conserving 500 gallons of gas a year, but do I get a subsidy? No, I get taxed to pay for some asshole in a Prius. Totally unfair.
Will this giveaway to wealthy gasoline hogs & greedy car companies reduce oil consumption? I don't think so. By subsidizing cars you are encouraging people to drive more. Instead of reducing their driving, they will get a nice discount just so they can consume. And like I said earlier, if you want more of something you subsidize it. People who get this prize will take that money and make more trips, do more consuming, burn more fuel.

Do rises in fuel efficiency in cars reduce oil consumption in general? History tells us no. In the period of rising MPG in the overall American fleet, vehicle miles traveled actually shot up. This means that the intended benefits of higher MPG gets consumed. And as the US car fleet improved in the 1980s, more gasoline got consumed as well (a.k.a Jeavon's Paradox). You do not reduce fuel consumption by driving more in a high MPG car.
This idea is awful. It is the worst thing we could do.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Indiantiger, your an idiot.

[pip]

Sounds great. I have two nearly worthless cars that would suddenly be worth $4000.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

We need to consume more energy, but less wastefully. That will increase productivity and increase the standard of living. Trading in old cars for new cars will use more energy than what will be saved in fuel. I say keep driving the old cars, most businesses use a item until it fails and then replaces it, they don't replace an item because it's inefficent in energy use. If a company were to replace all it's light fixtures with energy efficent lights, instead of wasting time replacing them all at once, best thing to do is wait until a light burns out and replace it with an energy efficent globe, slowly but surely you'll replace the whole lot over time when the old ones burn out. What you were suggesting is to replace all good inefficient globes with efficient ones, it would be cheaper to replace them one by one when they burn out.

[dub_scratch]

Thanks Dukat. I was wondering if anybody else was going to show some (un)common sense here.
Yes, as you point out Dukat, destroying a perfectly good car-- as you replace it with a hybrid-- is a means of destroying a cars embodied energy. In a nutshell, the buyback folly would be a step backward energetically. I've read that a car takes an average of 20% of the lifetime fuel to build it.

All that we need to do for conservation of energy in transport is to drive much, much less. We can drastically reduce our fuel use on the same fleet of cars that we see today. This would allow for resources that would go into a subsidized hybrid or EV to go into alternative energy. We can buy and build wind turbines instead of an energy sink hybrid. Wouldn't that be a better thing to subsidize?
In the below thread is a real solution that would drastically cut fuel consumption on our current fleet. No buyback req'd.
Ad-hoc carpooling thread

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Your exactly right, Hydrid cars are total bullshit, they they still need oil to run. If they give more efficency I don't know, but I bet 100% if the total weight of an SUV was carrying 500kg and the hybrid was also carrying the same total weight in body to a SUV, I still think the SUV would come out on top. An SUV doesn't waste any energy converting oil into power for the electric motor so there would be a fuel saving. I've never been very impressed with the hybrids, if you load them up, they'll use more fuel if your carrying a trailer than an suv. The best car is a traditional compact which you can buy secondhand cheap, not some new hybrid bullshit car through marketing saying buy this car and your more greener than people defecating in their vegetable garden.

[azreal60]

Guys, tone it down a bit. I realize your talking about serious things, but what indian tiger proposed has a heck of alot more likelyhood of actually getting thru a legislature than anything i've heard either of you propose. More importantly,

Indiantiger, your an idiot.

is what's known as an ad hom attack. As in, attacking someone directly because you don't like his ideas. And as it's normally the result of someone who doesn't have a counter arguement, not to mention very rude, it is something we are very discouraging on this site about. As in, can it. Capish?
(Note: I am not saying i agree with indian tiger that this is a good idea. In fact, in principal I agree that this is not a good idea at all. But at least someone's throwing some ideas in the ring that sound somewhat acheiveable instead of all this pie in the sky sci fi stuff. It's start.)
Edit: Also, having gone back and noticing a few things, indian tiger has only two posts on this site. Other than the extreme lurkers, most people aren't extremely well informed on joining this site. So give him or her some time before you start slamming them for not knowing basics. Basics you should still learn indian tiger, go look at some of the welcome and stickied topics in each forum. This will give you a good reference as to what you should know.

[Dukat_Reloaded]

Lets add candy floss and suger pictures. Really when some says somthing and someone questions it, is that so bad? whoever this tiger guy is, if he really believes in what he is saying then he will produce a counter argument. If he doesn't his idea is flawed and he diserves all ridicule .

[azreal60]

What's the intelligent counter argument to

Indiantiger, your an idiot.

?
I mean, doesn't that just automatically start the conversation off as a hostile yelling match where nothing really get's said of import, just two people in an idea's war. Or even worse, does it stifle the debate before it get's started, because someone's idea of fun doesn't include getting yelled at by someone he doesn't even know.

I don't know if any of the above are true about this debate, but what i do know is it's against the sites rules. You can attack the IDEA all you want, and rightly should. But don't call someone an idiot. And certainly not on their second post. That's counter productive and just stifles the debate. Not to mention makes you look like you don't know what your talking about. The only reason to start off with an ad hom attack is if you have no convincing arguments to throw at the person. After all, if you had a convincing argument, why not lead with that? No need for 2nd grade level name calling at all. So don't do it.

[Guest]

Maybe if the government paid $4000 redeemable only in public transit passes you would have something.

[Keith_McClary]

The program would be a $4B program providing anyone with a car built before 1995, to trade it in for a car made after the year 2000 getting at least 30 mpg. The government pays $4,000. It can be used, new, but has to be made in America. It would pay for 1,000,000 cars and could reduce consumption by 1 million barrels per day. Not to mention reducing emissions substantially.

There was an pilot program in Calgary, Canada:
http://casahome.org/breathe-easy/index.asp

Do you have a car thirteen years or older?
Here's your chance to send it to Car Heaven and qualify for incentives and prize draws.

Car Heaven Alberta grew out the Breathe Easy pilot program which removed 536 polluting vehicles from Calgary in 10 weeks.
The Breathe Easy pilot program is concluded.

The incentives were discount coupons at car dealers and transit passes, much less than $4000.

You could also look at Japan where they require very rigorous mechanical inspections every 2(?) years, resulting in low mileage Japanese vehicles being exported. (A great deal for Kiwis who also drive on the wrong side of the road).

Compare this to the US where anyone is free to drive an ancient gas guzzling beater with it's pollution controls disabled.

[WisJim]

Older doesn't necessarily mean less efficient. Our 1991 Chevy Geo Prizm ( a toyota corolla in chevy skin) gets 25 to 30mpg in town, and 40 to 42 on the highway. My son's Honda Civic VX, a 1992 model, was EPA rated at 55mpg hiway, and gets in the upper 40s around town. My old VW beetle often got over 30mpg, and actually got 44 or so on the interstate on occcassion, and it was a 1971. I find that many of the newer models of cars are bigger and more powerful than they were 10 to 15 years ago, cost more, and get poorer gas mileage. And they seem to be harder and more expensive to maintain and repair. We do a good job of maintaining our cars, so I don't think that they are polluting as bad as many vehicles on the road, and are certainly getting much better gas mileage than the average vehicle.

There really aren't any new vehicles available that I can get very excited about--a Toyota Prius sounds good, and a plug-in version even better, but you might need to be an electronics whiz in addition to being a mechanical wizard to repair much of what is under the hood.

[aahala]

Indiantiger, the basic idea of a government subsisdy may have some merit, but your numbers are way off the mark.
One million cars aren't even 1% of the cars in the US, if the program
reduced the useage to ZERO, it wouldn't reduce gasoline consumption
1%. You might get a million gallons(not barrels) reduction but the US
uses about 380 million gallons of gasoline, plus a lot of diesel. Certainly
a reduction of 20% of oil prices is not possible with this idea.
The quickest method to reduce oil prices, is to greatly increase the price of gasoline, but people's interest isn't in reducing oil prices, but gas.

[Keith_McClary]

Older doesn't necessarily mean less efficient.

It would be pretty easy to make a list of vehicles with priority for scrapping - not necessarily based on age, as you say.
My point was that the incentives don't have to be $4000 - these vehicles are worthless, the only reason they're on the road is that they're still running and the price of a fill-up is less than the cost of a replacement vehicle.
California eg. has rigorous standards for fuel efficiency and pollution control for new vehicles, but they allow people to drive 20 year old polluting gas guzzlers which are responsible for most of the pollution and waste.

[Barbara]

They made a similar program here in Italy some years ago. It was an amazing success. But they did it to get revenues from sale taxes, not for fuel saving.

[Indiantiger24]

Wow, great number of responses. After reading the thread I tend to agree that giving money away to buy more cars is not the answer. After greater reflection the main themes of my post were:
1) Old cars are generally less efficient than newer, lighter small cars with CVT, smaller more efficient engines, etc.
2) Small changes in demand or a program that aims to reduce total oil use will have a great psycological effect on oil prices. This will cause a beneficial cycle of extra dollars in the US that could be used for other purposes, including continuing the cycle
3) Older cars cause lots more pollution than newer cars and should serve as another reason to get older cars out of the market.
With scrap steel and other commodity prices going through the roof, I am sure that folks would love the chance to dismantle these cars.
My general feeling is that scaring people into caring about Peak Oil isn't going to have the desired effect. We have to figure out ways of switching people to a lower petroleum use lifecycle without saying that the "world will come to an end"

[Keith_McClary]

Wow, great number of responses. After reading the thread I tend to agree that giving money away to buy more cars is not the answer.

I had the idea that old clunkers should (gradually) be banned from freeways. Granny could still drive her '82 Crown Vic to the local church every Sunday - it would not be a big pollution or energy consumption issue.