by John Galt » Tue Jan 20, 2015 3:36 pm
also note that while european cars are "cleaner" than american ones this is because their testing standards are laughable. they strip down the car, removing seats and other things to reduce weight. then they go to a track high in the mountains on special surfaces to test the vehicle after pumping special gases in the tires. the economist said this results in real-world mpg to be nearly 40% less than what the sticker says. lol...
so europe isn't doing as well as the us in terms of emissions. the reason is simply that they have done the opposite of what needs to be done. they flipped out about fukishima, and at the same time they flip out about fracking. as a result the US is awash in cheap natural gas (we have so much of it we burn it because it's too expensive to keep around, causing north dakota to look like a major metropolis from above) which is much much cleaner than coal. moving electric production over to natural gas is both economical and "eco-friendly" and it's made possible by fracking
Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience. -- Theodore Roosevelt
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.