*UPDATE* The second round of the Cash For Clunkers program ended this Monday at 8:00 PM. Once again, the program ran out of money ahead of schedule due to its extreme popularity. If you didn’t manage to trade in your gas-guzzler this time, don’t worry! You’ll probably get another chance next year since the Detroit 3 have been lagging behind international auto companies in commercializing electric vehicles. In the meantime, consider riding your bicycle and learning how to use your local public transit. It’ll be healthier for you, your community, and your planet.

Just before leaving for recess, the U.S. Senate approved additional funding for Cash for Clunkers - the government program to incentivize (pay) people to trade in their old cars for new slightly more efficient ones. This widely successful program dramatically improved car sales and was credited with reducing domestic CO2 emissions by 700,000 tons, saving consumers over $216 million a year in gasoline costs, and protecting American manufacturing jobs.

The biggest success of the program wasn’t the small reduction in carbon emissions and oil use, but that it proved that consumers demand more fuel efficient cars.  Even though the minimum fuel efficiency gain needed to receive a rebate for trading in your old car was a meager 1 MPG increase for light trucks and 4 MPG for passenger cars, the average clunkers brought in were almost 10 MPG more than the cars they replaced. Now, because American auto companies have been in denial about the need for more efficient options, over half of sales were foreign cars, and all of the top 10 trade-in models are made by the Detroit Three.

Cash for Clunkers’ victory allowed for consumer’s  voices to be heard and set the stage for Senators Bingaman (D-NM), Snowe (R-ME), Lugar (R-IN) and Kerry (D-MA) to introduce legislation to take the program to its next logical step. The Efficient Vehicle Leadership Act of 2009 (S. 1620) would use the current CAFE level as a baseline to establish a feebate rewarding consumers who purchase more efficient vehicles and charging more for gas guzzlers. This legislation will move us from Cash for Clunkers’ expensive,  short-term, and environmentally negligible stimulus to a long-term strategy to modernize America’s auto fleet to meet our planetary challenges. The feebate is structured to give the Detroit 3 enough time to catch up with the rest of the world and put the decision in the consumer’s hands: it’s a win-win situation.

Due to its success in stimulating the economy, it is hard to find people openly critical of Cash for Clunkers, but there are some serious and structural short-comings that should be discussed more openly among the progressive community in order to take the next step towards a truly clean energy economy.  As the Onion eloquently puts it:

Paul Bachman,

Lacquer Polisher
“Great, first they end my local toys-for-guns program, and now this. Soon no one’s going to reward you for acquiring things that make the world a shitty place.”

This Congress has a bad habit of bailing out corporations and CEOs instead of bailing out the workers whose industries are too corrupt and short-sighted to innovate and produce what consumers really want. Perhaps paying people to change their cars is not the most productive use of federal funds when a similar objective could be achieved by increasing funding for local governments to expand their mass transit systems, or by establishing a Cash for Clunkers program for inefficient refrigerators (one of the most cost-effective ways to drastically reduce energy use and a tactic that many states are starting to use). Cash for Clunkers unfortunately did nothing to incentivize Americans to leave their cars behind, and some transportation experts argue that it will actually encourage more driving because people tend to drive new cars more than old ones.

Unfortunately The United States needs a revolution to both move our cars off of oil and move people away from cars unless absolutely necessary. If the feebate legislation will pass it will help us achieve the first goal, but without a serious investment in public transit how is the government hoping to achieve the second?