From DarwinCatholic:
At the end of the day, I can't help suspecting one of the real reasons for all our regulations in regards to cars is to make sure that the car inventory turns over often enough. Having driven my car 4,600 miles in the last 16 months (so the JiffyLube guy told me in wonder) I'm not exactly destroying the planet — but the government won't rest until I shell out the money to buy a new car, which would probably involve more emissions to produce than driving my '96 around for another decade.
Yup.
And unless you get it immediately junked, what's going to happen is that someone else will buy your old car and there will be one more on the road. At the margins it makes a difference: the more old cars there are on the road, the more people can afford a car. Some folks would say that's a good thing, and some would say it's a bad thing; I won't take a position, having sympathy for both sides and no inclination to run through the calculations right now; but when you buy a brand-new, high-mpg vehicle you can feel good about, those older cars don't usually disappear into thin air.
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