Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
kers” in the US and generally as “car scrappage” schemes elsewhere. These
gave people a cash payment to scrap their older cars provided they bought
a new and usually more energy-efficient car.
The programmes had flaws. Only some governments specifically
required that the new cars bought should be more fuel-efficient than the
old cars turned in. France, Italy and Spain imposed this condition. The
US, Germany and the UK did not, although most new cars of a compara-
ble size will use less fuel than an old one. In the US the average mileage of
clunkers scrapped was 15.8 miles per gallon, and of the new ones bought
24.9mpg. A further flaw of Germany's big scrappage scheme was the
lack of any enforced destruction of old models. So some German clun-
kers were reported to have been illegally sold on to African and Central
Asian markets, thereby lessening the scheme's benefit to global emissions
despite its undoubted benefit to the German car industry.
All stimuli create a slowdown when they cease. For instance, the US
programme ran during July and August 2009 and gave people $3bn
towards the cost of buying nearly 700,000 new cars during that period.
But US cars sales fell sharply in September (though they recovered later).
It will generally be very hard for deeply-indebted governments not to stop
in the recovery what they started in the recession. Most countries will
have to squeeze public spending very hard, and it is impossible to imagine
energy programmes escaping the axe altogether. Yet it is just such start-
stop approaches that shake investors' confidence in governments' ability
to set a long-term climate-change framework and stick to it.
