Cash for Clunkers, helping the environment?

by Christopher Flynn — Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Cash for Clunkers sounds great, let's get older cars that are inefficient and replace them with more efficient vehicles. But at what cost? Let's look at the economic as well as the environmental issues.

The environment is a hot topic right now, It's cool to be green. That's not a bad thing but does Cash for Clunkers really help the environment? Some may say that it reduces the emissions of the vehicles but by how much? There is currently 260 million cars on the road and we're talking about replacing 1/4 of a million of them. That's such a small amount, I doubt it will be noticed. Plus the new cars will still emit CO2, just less of it.

Ok, but it should help people save money on gas right? Well under the current program, you can trade in your car that get's 18mpg for one that get's 22mpg. Not a big improvement is it? Also now you have a car payment that will probably cost you more than what you save in gas, but at least you now have a new car.

Also, what happens to your old car? It get's recycled right? Well most of it does, however there are parts of a vehicle that can't be recycled. There are some nasty fluids in a vehicle that can't be recycled and there are energy cost to crush these vehicles and to produce the new ones.

So the costs for this program isn't just the money we are giving people to buy new ones, it's also the cost for destroying the old ones. Why destroy them? There are a lot of charity organizations that take older vehicles that will be hurt by this. You are also hurting those who can't afford new vehicles by destroying what they can afford to buy. Most of these "clunkers" still have a lot of life in them. Yes, it would probably be better if the gas guzzling SUVs were never built in the first place but they were so why destroy them and create waste?

So who does this benefit? Well it benefits the automakers, and who just recently got into the auto making business? The Federal Government. So now even more of our tax dollars are going to bail out some of the auto-industry, in the name of helping the environment. I'm not sold, if their goal really was to help the environment then why not put in higher restrictions on what kind of new car you can buy? Why not just give tax credits to people buying high efficiency vehicles? My motorcycle get's better gas mileage than a Prius, shouldn't we encourage people to get motorcycles or even to take public transportation? I guess that's not cool enough to be green.