From J. M. O. SCURLOCK
President Bush’s ‘green’ initiative, to allow polluting industries in
the US to buy up and scrap pre-1971 cars instead of attending to their
own dirty emissions (This Week, 4 April), needs to be shown up for the cheap
publicity stunt it is. Oil companies and other major polluters who are reluctant
to invest in new low-emissions technology are being offered a cheap way
out at the expense of America’s stock of classic cars. Environmentalists
have just as much cause to be annoyed as lovers of the ill-fated ‘Yank
tanks’.
Bland declarations from the White House that this kind of thing ‘reduces
reliance on imported oil’ are a sick joke, coming from a pro-oil government
which refuses to be tied down to stabilising carbon dioxide emissions and
threatens to upset the forthcoming Earth Summit in Brazil.
The refusal of a small sector of society to turn its cars over to the
rapid cycles of fast moving consumer goods provides the rest of us with
examples of durability and long-life technology, not to mention nostalgia.
Detroit never intended the cars of the Fifties and Sixties to last for
30 years or more, but many have done so. At a time when giant car manufacturers
are scrambling to introduce ‘recyclable’ components into their latest models,
long-lived ‘reusable’ cars sustained by spare parts remanufactured in small
workshops are bucking the trend.
Individual old bangers and hot rods may seem like pollution machines
alongside the latest low-emission, lean-burn, electronic engine management
technology, but their combined population is a drop in the ocean of today’s
congested road networks, where all the benefits of modern engine design
are wiped out by increased vehicle usage.
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Until the US and other countries can grasp the nettle of designing better
public and private transport systems which use less energy and produce less
pollution in total, measures such as ‘cash-for-clunkers’ deserve only contempt
from environmentalists and car enthusiasts alike.
J. M. O. Scurlock King’s College London
