Question of the Day: Government Vehicle Emission Standards- Good Idea or Pure Evil?

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

Since the first Clean Air Act was passed in 1963 Americans have been howling about the pros and cons of The Gubmint controlling what comes out of vehicle tailpipes. The new regs didn’t have any profound effects on what we drove until that raging liberal Richard Nixon— no doubt distracted by the Vietnam War and influenced by the hydrocarbon-o-riffic air quality of his native Southern California— allowed the Clean Air Act Extension of 1970 to become law. The automakers, having relied upon their vast lobbying power to keep them safe from such troublesome government meddling, hadn’t done much to prepare for heavy-duty restrictions on exhaust emissions and had no choice but to go for the low-tech, power-killing solutions that made the Malaise Era feel so endless. We’re talking about good old-fashioned “smog” emissions here, i.e. hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, and carbon monoxide, not greenhouse gases. The stuff that made Los Angeles air nearly unbreathable for decades. California and federal smog standards made a huge difference in air quality in Southern California and elsewhere, but complying with those standards cost the American automotive industry dearly. Was it worth it? Cars sure as hell put out tiny fractions of the pollutants they once did; you can’t smell hydrocarbons on the freeway these days unless you’re behind an old car, and they say new cars don’t even make enough CO to kill you by running in a closed garage.

There are two ways to look at the early history of tailpipe emission laws in the United States, depending on one’s biases. If you hate and/or fear any form of government regulation of industry, then such laws were a conscious effort to destroy the foundations of American free enterprise, leading directly to meals of groats in the communal kitchen and your children sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag under Article 58, end of story. If you think big corporations just want to externalize all costs at the expense of public health, etc., while sucking the blood out of the working class as an added bonus, then it’s pretty obvious: the only problem with tailpipe emission laws, then and now, is their weakness. We used to have more nuanced ways of looking at such issues, but a decade or so of internet discourse has simplified matters: pick your side!

So, was it worth it? Do the less-blackened lungs of 20 million urban Californians justify a decade of 130-horsepower V8s and billions of lost profits for Detroit? Would market forces have solved the smog problem on their own? Is smog really a problem? Was it a conspiracy? Discuss.

Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Philosophil Philosophil on Jul 08, 2011

    Thanks for the great topic, Murilee. I guess even you couldn't resist dropping at least one political bomb, but it actually turned out to be a very good question.

  • Ciddyguy Ciddyguy on Jul 09, 2011

    Lots of good replies here and I'll ad my .02 cents worth, having grown up in the 70's and became a man in the 80's is that while the emissions systems for forced into production MUCH too early, the big 3 were also at fault for resisting and then adapting these new technologies to ancient motors that were not designed with these systems in the first place and the results showed with dismal performance and fuel economy. So the big 3 were largely at fault here for the malaise era but ALL cars built of that era suffered some when affixed with these new systems, even the Euro/Japanese cars when not of the Honda CVCC models, those performed like they should DESPITE they being able to have as clean or cleaner emissions than just abut everyone else while still able to use leaded gas initially. The newer CVCC II motors had to use the then new unleaded gas and they STILL performed well (with catalytic converters no less) I know as I had a 1983 Civic with the 1500cc CVCC motor and it was quite zippy and a hoot to drive.

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