I will worry about my car's emmisions when they stop racing NASCAR. 42 cars running 500 miles and burning hunderds of gallons of racing fuel week after week. Ban that before bitching about my old car or fullsize truck.
Recycling bits and pieces of cars into a hot rod in your garage does not require a huge recycling "plant" to do it. Taking the remnants of a worn out Kia, separating and processing each of the materials it took to build it down into a form that can be re-used, and turned into (a percentage of) a new Kia takes a lot of energy. Kind of a variation on what atomickustom said: I'll leave you to drive whatever you want, if you do the same for me, I won't shoot you.
Complete combustion results in little to no pollution, and if you keep your car in tune, which most guys who work on their own cars are usually both able to do and interested in doing, they do not create the emissions that the gov't made the factories put AIR and catalytic converters and so on, to eliminate. Unless you want to accept the argument that CO2 is pollution, but in my opinion that's bullshit. Anyone who took grade school science knows that plants through photosynthesis convert CO2 to oxygen, using the rest as food in their growth cycle. More CO2 = more plants = more oxygen. I hate to delve into politics, but the green movement is more about a sneaky way to impose socialism on us, than it is about saving the planet. Al Gore? He owns a company that sells carbon credits... he stands to make millions convincing people to believe his bullshit. It never ceases to amaze me the people who believe that this global warming stuff is real, even though this planet has had several major ice ages and they all ended and the planet warmed up again without a single SUV to emit CO2 into the air. Not only that, the dinosaurs were cold-blooded, so they weren't out there farting up a storm either. A single major volcano eruption can put more pollution into the atmosphere than man has in over 100 years, though. So it boils down to making it hard to discuss one without the other, because these pricks have it all tied in together. I'd like to see them all drop dead, personally, I don't care if my old car gets 10 MPG or 30 MPG, you're not going to tell me what I can and can't drive around in on some erronious assumption about what's good or bad for the planet that even if everyone in the country did the same supposedly bad thing I did it wouldn't make one tinker's damn of difference in the grand scheme of things. This planet is many million more years old than man is - it's ridiculously arrogant to presume man can destroy it in a few thousand years, short of an outright full-scale nuclear war. So these people can take their socialsim and their arrogant attitude and stick it where the sun doesn't shine, you're not going to presume to tell me you know better than I do and tell me what to do. If you want to live that way, there are plenty of other countries who have that sort of rule, move there. And take the damned Prius with you. /rant
A lot of the new cars which are supposedly economy cars weigh as much as the big full sized cars of the '60s. A new Toyota Camry Hybrid weighs 3865 pounds, and a 1960 Impala weighed 3834 pounds. But the uppity owners of these "economy cars" will make all kinds of comments about how you're driving a "big boat" if you're in an old Impala, like their new car is just a skinny little surfboard or something. When they recycle the newer cars, they throw the whole car into some evil machine that shreds them to pieces and then they burn all the plastic out of them. That's a lot of burning plastic. And it makes a big stinky cloud. I don't think they have a good plan for what to do with all the dead batteries from all these hybrid cars they're making. If every car in the world was a hybrid someday, is there enough lead or cadmium or whatever they use to go around for everyone in the world to own one anyway?
Alot of good points made. The gas mileage is what I keep going back to though, few years back I had an 85 Fiero come into my hands. Had a 2.5 with 5spd and 140,000 miles or so. Put a full tuneup on it, replaced a few sensors and got 39.6 mpg with that car on the highway. No way can you say that GM's throttle body injection of the 80's is even close to the FI setups nowadays. Then when I hear all the rhetoric about 50plus mpg in a hybrid I wonder what the carmakers are doing wrong to only be getting thaat kind of mileage.
atomic custom said it good, they can do what they all want but I drive my recyled olds cutlass , i cant afford a new car IF i wanted one! right now it aint even easy to pay my bills! my wife got a o4 cavalier 80,000 miles leaks oil, trans fluid(no dipstick you check trans fluid with a scanner at the dealership) eats tires, rides like crap, no warranty it ended at 36,000, speedo tempgauge fuel gauge died at 35,+ they couldnt get her in for a couple of weeks and wouldnt honor her warranty when she went in (bumper to bumper 36000). newer cars suck if your poor!!!!!! at least i can fix my olds, oh ya all that stuff works on the olds!!!
A few years ago some tree-huggers torched about 30 New SUVs at the Chevy dealer in Eugene, OR in order to keep them from destroying the environment. They did it at night so you couldn't see all the black, acrid smoke billowing into the sky. Burning just one of those vehicles released more pollutants into the environment than the whole lot would during their combined service life. And most of those rigs will never leave pavement anyway.
Hell, you can buy the smell in a can now. I hear you. Screw the new stuff that costs as much as the house I'm living in. I'll never own new again unless I hit the lottery.
I cannot comment on the political aspect, because there are so many angles on that, that one could never cover it all, plus someone would claim to know better anyway. Yet: Think about just one: Did Al Gore own the company that sells carbon credits before he started on his campaign, or did he buy/found the company so that he could make money?? And if you had had the idea/opportunity to make money, would you turn it down?? Nevertheless, this is about cars; old vs. new. For most of us, it's a moot point: we'll have an old car for a hobby, and drive new for daily. A few of us will drive old exclusively, but even amongst this group, I suspect that percentage is single digits, low teens at best. For the rest of the populace, it's absolutely no question, they'll drive new because the mechanical aspect of our daily life is gradually fading away. By that I mean the necessity of knowing how to fix things. I grew up a farmer's kid, and a farmer never had the money to pay a repairman, anyway. Dad either fixed it, or it stayed broke. These days, the man who knows how to change a lightswitch is a rarity. Those who go any farther are truly unusual. Changing the oil is still very do-able, yet most don't. But the argument that a new car will not outlast an old car are simply untrue. A poorly kept new car will not outlast a well kept older car, but that's just apples and oranges. However, the newer cars are so well built that they tolerate poor maintenance far better than ever, and that reason alone may be why many end their lives early. Cosmo
Yeah, rustynewyorker's post is right on! Besides CO2 being absorbed by plants during photosynthesis, it's also absorbed into the ocean. It's a cycle that's been going on for a billion years. A lot of the carbon winds up combined with calcium in the form of plankton and sea shells which millions of years later makes mountains and mountains of limestone. CO2 makes up .03 % of the atmosphere, and of that piddly amount, most of it comes from other sources like volcanoes, cows farting, termites farting, decomposing vegetation, etc. Water vapor is also a "greenhouse gas". Water vapor makes up about 3% of the atmosphere. 100x more than the CO2. The sun's output is variable. The surface temperature on Mars has been rising recently too, and amazingly there are no 1974 Mercury Marquis Broughams driving around on Mars to blame for it. The global temperatures have been rising and falling forever. I would rather have a 1 degree rise, than a 1 degree fall. Who's so arrogant that they can say that the temperatures that we have right now are the ideal temperature to have until eternity? Do we really think we can stop changes that have been going on forever? Sooner or later we will have another ice age, where glaciers will pour down over half of North America. 50 or 100 years from now, people will be laughing at us for being such gullible idiots to fall for all this global warming hysteria. "Global Warming" is nothing but a bunch of political hype intended to push the government's social agenda.
Global warming, HA! I heard a week or so ago the now they believe we may be entering another Ice Age! They say over the course of this past summer the earth's temp has dropped from the previous 4 or 5 summer's temps. We may actually be starting a cooling trend that will probably last over the next 20-30 years, according to those that did the latest study. Suppose all this crap they have been forcing down our throtes has worked? Na, me neither. I am also interested to find out how a V8 that gets 25mpg is producing more polutents than a V6 or a I4 that gets 21 mpg? One would think the higher milage would inducate a more complete burning of the fuel? But what do I know. Back in the day, the emmission standards were devoloped because of the number of car owners that were not keeping their cars properly tuned up. The air quality in larger US cities was very bad in 1966. With the first simple epa standards the air quality had improved greatly by 1971! The epa decided that if a little was good, more would be better, and they have continued unrestrained since. Since the mid 70s the air quality in the large US cities has been declining at a steady rate, mostly due to the growing number of cars on the city streets. Some level of an emission standard is good. One only needs to look at the air quality in China before the Olympics. China has no emission standards (think LA in 1966) and to improve the air quality they requiered 1/2 the cars to stay off the roads and closed 1/2 the factories in the city. For this radical move they temperalary improved the air quality. We in the US have gone past that point of "some" standards, until the rest of the world catches up, what we do from here is foolish. The prospect of using the the car build process and scrap process to compare our style car to the new cars is a mute point. Both required energy to build. Though the process and the time peroid was different, the energy was still displaced. At some point in time both will be scrapped. The energy will be displaced. Most of our cars will be rebuilt, that would be energy displaced the new car probably won't see. Now lets say the new car goes 200K before it is scrapped, odds are good your old car went les then the first 100k before it came under your control, then you rebuilt it, and it may or may not see another 100K before it gets scrapped. Given the idea that rebuilt would likely consume less energy then a new build, you may still be behind the energy curve. To be accurate, one would have to compare the energy used over the life of the vehical devided by the miles that consumed energy covered. I suppose that if you hot rod has a million miles on it, you could compare it to 4 or 5 new ones for energy consumed, but don't forget to include the number of rebuilds you did to your car to get to the million miles. Some of you guys are funny. Don't get me wrong, I love hot rods, but I'm not stupid enough to believe my hot rods are going to save the planet. I'm also not stupid enough to believe we are going have much of a long lasting effect on this planet, reguardless of what we do to it. But that does not give me a right to waste what has been given to us to take care of for the future generations. Gene
Ah yes but law makers in various states would lead you to believe that getting rid of hot rods WILL save the planet. Or at least passing laws to make them compliant to a brand new car will. I think that is the main argument/focus, let each person drive what they want a prius or a deuce.
His "Carbon Credit Bank" just "Tanked"...!!! He'll have to narrate another movie or ten to recover all that lost "Carbon Money" he got from the "Clintons"! Bravo... total redemption for you Brother!!!
hot damn, you guys are saying a lot of the stuff i bitch about to my green wife all the time. glad i'm not the only one that sees it all like this. after seeing that penn and teller bullshit episode on recycling, i don't do it. my favorite point to make with it all though is just like a couple of you guys said...this planet has been around millions of years with a constant warming and cooling trend. who the hell are we to think that we have the power to destroy it? we are so insignificant in the geological timeline, if the dinosaurs lasted a year, we've been around like 12 seconds. now 50dodge4x4 brings up another point that i like to argue. a v8 getting better mileage than a smaller engine would technicaly be putting out less emissions because it is running more efficiently. BUT there are three main areas that are tested and it would likely fail because emissions compliance doesn't mean efficiency. to run most efficiently, there are actually some "harmful" agents being put out into the atmosphere. still doesn't really matter but it is a point to consider. lastly, you guys wanna watch bullshit? here's links to all their episodes...watch "environmental hysteria"
Plastic can not be turned into bio-diesel. I believe it can be turned into some form of diesel, but bio-diesel is made from organic sources. There is nothing organic about plastic.
Good post,.. When asked, I say my 41 is one of the 'first' GREEN cars,--- *All steel, *some bakelite *at least 10 families recycled this truck & it still going... -41-
I sold my PT cruiser and now just drive my '83 S-10 with 350 power. It has a carb and a dist and I can fix it! Funny thing is my '60 Bonneville gets great gas milage but I only drive it to car things,,trying to save the tranny.
There was a study of recreational fuel use done in New Zealand in the seventies (during the first oil crisis) and it turned out that motorsport was nowhere near the top of the list. The top recreational fuel users were sports like Horse Racing, Rugby, Golf, etc, and this was due to the large numbers of people driving to venues to watch or play. Obviously the actual numbers will have changed since the seventies, but I think you will still find that the fuel consumed in motorsport is still a small fraction of total recreational fuel use. It's just an easy target for knee-jerk reactions by politicians.
The Jalopy Journal
