Today I got the press release heralding the House passage of HR 2640. This turd of a bill would offer up to $4,500 as credit for a new car (what else?) to anybody turning in their old car. You know, saving the environment and everything with recycling (and making a tidy profit for members of the American International Auto Dealers Association, by the way). Basically, these folks took a big, steaming crap in the middle of the living room, and they're damn proud of it; the press release only exists because they want me to say what a great job they did on it.
It got me thinking: what if you couldn’t buy any kind of new car, period? According to these AIADA folks, that would be horrible, but wait a minute, wouldn’t that FORCE people to recycle? I’m talking about REAL meat-and-potatoes recycling, not the crush it, melt it, smelt it, stamp it, revamp it, send-it-off-to-China kind that uses way more natural resources than it saves. I’m talking about the kind of recycling they do in Cuba.
With the trade embargo of 1959, Cuba hasn’t had the benefit of our domestic new car industry for quite some time. That has forced car owners there to keep their cars on the road far longer than they ever were designed for. In the process, they’ve spared the environment from giving up untold quantities of natural resources. The amount of extra pollution produced by these older cars is far outweighed by the manufacturing equity that was saved in the process.
In this lifetime, you’ll never see me coming out in favor of a communist regime, but the example illustrates in this one case how very wrong the lobbyists and the politicians here got it. They’ve completely hijacked and subverted the recycling/environmental theme for their own purposes, the truth be damned.
They’ve been recycling in Cuba for 50 years, and there’s nobody from the government handing out checks for $4,500. And by the way, we’re already recycling in the US, too. It’s called hot rodding.