Your editorial "
Cash From Lunkheads" (June 13) doesn't mention it, but those seeking to "bail out" Detroit with the cash-for-clunkers program are misusing a program that was hugely successful 19 years ago. Congress is going about it all wrong.
In 1990, California's South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) proposed to close and ban all oil refineries (more than a dozen) from the Los Angeles basin. Unocal proposed to regulators that we run instead an experimental program of buying and destroying old cars (source of 60% of the pollution in the Los Angeles basin, as opposed to 5% from refineries). We at Unocal knew that the cost effectiveness of our proposal would far outstrip the AQMD's hideously costly and inefficient proposal.
The South Coast Recycled Auto Program (SCRAP) was hugely successful; its goals were clear and its economics powerful. The astounding environmental benefits to Los Angeles resulted in major regulatory and economic benefits to industry at no cost to the taxpayer.
Unocal paid $700 for locally registered, in-use, 20-year old vehicles. SCRAP crushed 8,376 pre-1971 vehicles between June 1 and Sept. 29, 1991. According to California Environmental Protection Agency and AQMD's testing and records, 12.8 million pounds of air pollution (hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides) were removed from Los Angeles's air each year for the next (very conservatively estimated) three-year period. Hydrocarbon emissions from SCRAP vehicles were 99 times greater than from a then-new 1990 vehicle, and about 200 or more times greater than new cars today, nearly three times the pollution that Cal/EPA and the AQMD had projected. Even those figures are understated; they include tailpipe emissions only. Carbon monoxide emissions were more than 50 times greater.
We were not allowed to count CO2 emissions because at the time they were not "pollutants" (and greenhouse gas emissions were unheard of). The EPA, Cal/EPA and the AQMD changed the rules to allow mobile source credits against stationary source emissions.
Forty-six percent of the principal drivers bought another vehicle, 42% were using another vehicle, 4% were getting rides and 4% were using public transportation. Of the replacement vehicles, more than 80% were newer (1975 or later), less polluting cars. If you consider the last point, the seller of those replacement cars typically bought a replacement (newer vehicle), and so on; the average set of transactions is 4 to 8 purchases from that first 20-plus-year-old car to a new one.
So an updated SCRAP could eliminate much argument for a cap-and-trade system with all its government participation, and all "need" for taxpayer bailouts. It would result in cleaner air, more efficient vehicles on the road. It would help clean up greenhouse gases, and would help Detroit sell more cars.
It would do all that without a massive federal handout and more government interference, so Congress won't give it much thought. It should; we all should. It's the kind of approach that would be cost-effective, and that would eliminate a half-baked series of bailouts and cap-and-trade schemes.
John L. Rafuse
Alexandria, Va.
