"To put it simply, old cars don't belong in our unique desert environment." It's scary to think that someone had that thought, let alone made it public. Unfortunately, though, it was said, and worse yet, it was spoken by someone in power, Fife Symington, the governor of Arizona. He is not alone. Your state's representatives could be thinking the exact same thing about your vehicle. But why does Big Brother give a hoot about what we're already driving? Isn't he busy enough designing ways to implant far-too-violating chips into vehicles for the next millennium? Well, that's what some people believe, but one of Brother's main concerns has to do with this little thing called air.
It all began when the Environmental Protection Agency said that our country's airborne pollution levels were out of control and demanded air-quality changes to meet federal ozone standards via the Clean Air Act. The hardest hit were factories, which produce emissions from "stationary" sources. However, big businesses were tired of always being the ones attacked for polluting the air and fined, so they suggested moving the focus to a quicker cure, "mobile" emissions: automobiles.
It made total sense. Think about how many older cars and light-duty trucks are on the road. And since they've been around forever, the buildup of contaminants spewing from the old guys (old usually means '81-and-earlier model-year vehicles) would have to be at what some call "ozone-destroying" levels. These gross polluters were destroying the planet. Therefore, they would have to be destroyed. This solution had the full support of environmental groups and the petroleum industry.
Enter the "voluntary accelerated retirement" of vehicles. Although the approaches vary, each program would provide owners of older vehicles a financial incentive (about $700) to scrap vehicles. The companies who ran the crushing programs would earn some sort of emissions allowance for every older vehicle crushed. By trading their emissions credits with the government, those "stationary" sources had an alternative means of obtaining emissions compliance without having to upgrade their facilities; in other words, companies could build up "mobile" source credits that would allow them to delay repairing their own polluting plants--they just had to crush enough "polluting" vehicles to equal the amount of emissions from the factory.
But wait a minute. When the vehicles came in to be crushed, would they be smog-checked? And how many had actually been parked in someone's backyard for years, not driven--meaning they would have little impact on overall pollution reductions if crushed? And wouldn't that mean companies would still get those emissions credits for crushing vehicles that don't pollute? Most crushing laws would require that the vehicles to be destroyed be registered, and if they're registered, then they probably passed a smog check. Therefore, the cash for clunkers program can actually increase air pollution.