Yep. CAFE-style regulation is the wrong way to attempt to reduce carbon emissions. The right way is to impose a carbon tax, then let consumers vote with their wallets and engineers work to make the right tradeoffs to meet customer demand. My guess is that consumers would choose to buy the more fuel-efficient vehicles and engineers might make the same tradeoffs... but now it would be clear that those tradeoffs are worthwhile.

Gas is pretty much exactly at its long-term, inflation-adjusted average price, and right where it was in the 1950s. Since then, it was a little higher in the 70s, a little lower in the 90s, a little higher in the early 2000s, but we're now back at the long-term normal price.

See https://afdc.energy.gov/data/1...

Whether the normal price of gas is "cheap" or "expensive" depends on your income and lifestyle, I'd think.

... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.

Tell that to the folks on ISS who ride back and forth on Soyuz all the time. A couple of people went up to ISS from Russia just one week ago.

To be fair, at the moment, future ISS launches from Russia won't be possible because of some launch pad damage incurred by a recent launch, but Russia still has the capability of launching crewed rockets into space from other pads. They just can't send any to ISS right now because its orbital inclination is incompatible with the locations of those other pads while staying within the fuel capacity limits of their rockets.

What are you talking about? On average, engines last 150k to 200k miles in the U.S., complete with CAFE standards.

And the main goal of the current CAFE standards was to push hybrids and electric vehicles. Manufacturers rigging the game by trying to make pure ICE cars with ridiculous mileage is an unanticipated negative side effect, mostly because the folks coming up with the rules did not expect automakers to be so stupid that they would do something like that.

This is an appropriate place for tariffs. Not ridiculous, exclusionary tariffs like we have, but tariffs carefully calibrated to offset the subsidies as precisely as possible, putting BYD's cars on a level playing field against US EVs. I have great faith in free market capitalism and dislike anything that distorts the market, but sometimes you need to use regulation to correct for external market distortions.

For the most part, oil change schedules are set so that car dealers can make money off of mandatory service so that you keep your warranty. In reality, if you periodically change your filter, use a filter with a smaller pore size, and use synthetic oil, there's at least potentially no need to change the oil at all, at least within the typical lifetime of a passenger car.

Semi goes 1 million miles without an oil change.

The problem is not the CAFE standards per se. The problem is that they are trying to meet them by playing tricks instead of with actual design changes. And even though they come with thinner engine oil, 90% of people will put standard oil into the cars at the first change. So they get higher MPG for the first 5,000 miles, and then the same as they did before the CAFE standards.

I suppose that in theory, you could argue that the standards are flawed for not requiring normal oil weights during testing, but that's about it.

The correct way to hit the MPG targets is to use more electric drive trains. If you make your cars hybrids, you can improve the efficiency of the electric drive train and find ways to engineer the vehicles to weigh less by using more modern materials, and you won't have to work too hard to hit the standards.

Better yet, push actual EVs, which typically have an eMPG of 100+. If just one-third of your vehicles get 130 eMPG and the rest get 30 MPG, you're averaging about 53 MPG already.

Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.

I think with the correct amount of monetary contribution to el Bunko, the boy can be brought back into the space program. It's magic!!!

Recall the Honduran president el Bunko just pardoned? The one who helped ship 100s of tons of cocaine to the U.S. Starting several years ago, his "people" started making the "correct" contributions to "Republicans" (read: el Bunko) and, as if by magic, a pardon appears.

Meanwhile el Bunko is blowing up small vessels off Venezuela arguing they are carrying fentanyl. They aren't, fentanyl doesn't come in boats from Venezuela. It comes via Mexico from chemicals supplied by China. Is he blowing up Chinese boats carrying these chemicals? Nope. That's because he never smacks anyone that can hit back because he's basically a weenie.

"Humans invent things."

No shit, including that anthropomorphic driven climate change is not a problem.

"AI is already chewing through research faster than half the committees publishing these forecasts."

Really? AI is now doing climate forecasting. Do tell. How's it doing on physics? Or chemistry outside of a few edge cases? Mathematics is not science but much science is based on mathematics. Where's the AI research breakthroughs on math?

"We’re developing materials, energy systems, geo-tech and carbon-capture methods that simply didn’t exist when the early models were written."

So what? There's no guarantee these will help climate change. Many might hurt climate change. And you have no way to predict it.

"Pretending society won’t respond, won’t adapt and won’t innovate is probably the most unrealistic assumption in the whole exercise."

Bullshit. "society" has shown very little in the way of adaptation. In fact, "society" is busy pumping more CO2 and Methane into the atmosphere than ever before. The American West is drying out because of it. Does it cause Americans do anything more than move? Not effectively.

Your entire screed is nothing more than whistling past the graveyard.

It is even worse than that. el Bunko and his witless slaves are slathering the bullshit around that they are bring manufacturing back to America for American jobs. Pushing robots just mean peopleless factories, no jobs, just another con job. And the robots or their parts will be made in China.

TDS? I do not think we need to bring the ability to believe la Presidenta into this.

la Presidenta First Rule: Nothing is done by him until he receives payment.

la Presidenta Second Rule: He destroys everything he touches.

la Presidenta Third Rule: You cannot set the morals and ethics bar so low that he cannot find a way to limbo under it.

Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.

The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.