CAFE standards were always a stupid idea. If we want to reduce fuel usage then increase the tax on fuel instead of punishing manufacturers for selling vehicles that consumers want to buy.
This is, respectfully, corporate propaganda. Consumers buy the vehicles that are available and advertised. It's in the best interest of manufacturers to convince/compel consumers to buy larger, more expensive vehicles with higher margins, and that's exactly what they're doing.
How many CAFE compliant “light trucks” do you see around?
CAFE is a great example of a well-meaning regulation failing because the people who developed and approved it didn’t think through the obvious consequences.
How can that be if they all offer extensive lines of small and efficient cars that a good number of people drive? Besides, collusion doesn't seem likely given the amount of foreign competition. The majority of Americans have made it clear that they want bigger autos, at least with the usual gas prices. Sorry if that's corp propaganda.
Separately I've heard emissions laws blamed for large sedans losing to small SUVs and trucks due to double standards, but I doubt it would've made a difference, even though I personally prefer large sedans.
If gasoline is more expensive, customers will demand more efficient vehicles.
We aren't mindless zombies buying whatever we see on TV. I'm old enough to remember when Japanese small cars practically took over the market in the 70s and 80s due to gas price shocks. It can happen again.
If gasoline is expensive because of carbon taxes, people will vote for a party that tells them that climate change is not a problem, and that, if they win, gasoline will be cheap again.
They probably won't buy Honda Civics, but they (or their children, more realistically) might buy the electric equivalent of an F150 if the market produces one that can fulfill what they perceive their needs to be.
I just bought a (small, hybrid) truck because I need to do some truck stuff. I 100% would have bought an electric if the market produced one with comparable capability and competitive price, but we're not there yet, and I don't have Rivian money (yet! lol maybe someday).
My point being: there is still a huge demand for trucks from both a capability and culture standpoint, and very little supply of a cost-comparable product that doesn't take gas or diesel. Rivian is around double what most people want to pay, and the F150 Lightning was marketed poorly and had bad towing/hauling range compared to gas/diesel equivalents.
I'm not here to defend "truck culture" but I do believe that if you offer people a better product, they will figure it out and buy it. An electric truck with 400+ miles of towing range, an onboard 2kW+ inverter, 500 ft-lbs of torque, and fast charging for the same price as a comparable gas F150 will sell. Unfortunately the battery energy density and EV supply chain economies of scale aren't there yet in North America.
Whatever your standard is for an "efficient" vehicle, more efficient things than those 15-20mpg trucks or SUVs do exist in the US. Every automaker sells a serious car that gets at least 30mpg combined if gas-only, or like 50mpg if hybrid.
> We aren't mindless zombies buying whatever we see on TV.
But we are. I don't want to turn this into a political slap fight but it became apparent to me the extent in which people are swayed by advertising when I read an article that talked about how one party in the US was concerned that the other was going to win an important seat becase the other party had done a recent spending surge on ads in last few days before election day and they were concerned that they couldn't match it.
That article right there forever changed my view of the average person on the street. In a highly polarized campaign and political environment with months to years of knowing who the candidates and policies are and they can still be swayed by millions in TV and radio ads? Like it sounds like these people could literally be on their way to vote for a candidate and then switch their mind at the last second because they hear an ad on the radio as they're pulling into the polling station.
That's absurd -- but it's real.
People are completely enthralled by advertisements to the point where they'll buy a stupid truck that they can't fit anywhere, that they need a ladder to climb into, that has terrible sight lines, simply because advertising tells them to.
Nah, it's not real. Your claim isn't supported by the data. Political advertising can help a bit at the margins but in the 2016 Presidential election the losing campaign spent about twice as much on advertising as the winner. Very few voters were swayed by last second radio ads.
(I would support a Constitutional amendment to restrict campaign contributions and effectively overturn the Citizens United v. FEC decision.)
Again, I don't want to get into a political slap fight here, I want to keep this on the subject of advertising.
It sounds to me like you're confusing the magnitude of advertising spending with effectiveness of advertising techniques.
Some people have found more effective ways to advertise to people, we know all this, it isn't uncharted conversation territory. We all know about micro-targetting based on personalized data, dominating certain niche mediums like AM radio to target people when they're driving and coordinated pushes with people in industry.
The point is that advertising works. It works disconcertingly well.
This is why people buy stupidly impractical automobiles that they don't need.
If you don't want to make this about politics, use a product advertising example instead of politics which is not even comparable.
Advertised products will sell more, but only to a certain point. Like someone who wants an SUV and knows nothing else might buy the one from Chevy instead of Mitsubishi because of advertising.
People want car insurance because it's a law, low-flow showerheads if water is expensive, and electric appliances if gas is expensive or outlawed. And some want fuel-inefficient vehicles because they like them and gasoline isn't very expensive, while plenty of other people opt for MPG.
Bullshit. There are many competing auto manufacturers. No one is compelled to buy larger, more expensive vehicles. There are smaller, cheap vehicles available to those who want them. If I want a little penalty box like a Hyundai Elantra or Nissan Sentra the local dealers have base models in stock and ready to sell today.
Larger vehicles are more comfortable, safe, and practical (for anyone who doesn't need to worry about parking issues). It doesn't take advertising to convince consumers about that, it's just reality.
A Hyundai Elantra of today is significantly bigger than it was ten years ago. It also used to be the second-tier model above the Accent, which was discontinued.
Large vehicles are safer for the occupants of the vehicle, however they do increase danger for pedestrians and drivers of other vehicles in a collision. There is a reasonable argument that reducing vehicle size would save lives overall
> This is a myth. Larger vehicles are not safer for their occupants; they merely feel that way.
I'm pretty sure it's not, because physics. A tank is safer than a bike for the poilot, when there is a collision. This data is a little muddled, but follows common sense.
Large SUVs and Pickups: These vehicles have the lowest occupant fatality rates, averaging 14 deaths per million registered vehicles for SUVs compared to 48 per million for sedans. Large luxury SUVs often register statistically zero deaths in specific three-year studies.
Nope, not a myth. While the data is noisy and there are some confounding factors, the IIHS driver death rates show a clear correlation between larger size and fewer deaths.
Domestic manufacturers used to build & sell compact pickup trucks. Nowadays, the only pickups on the market are huge fatmobiles. The profit margin in trucks is much higher than the profit margin on passenger cars.
Compare the Maverick to a Japanese kei trucks, they so impressed the current president that he signed an executive order allowing them, if they're manufactured in the US.
Good example of what they have in Japan right now.
The Maverick is quite sizable compared to the original Ford Ranger too, which was still bigger than the regular Japanese trucks that were all over the US after oil skyrocketed the first time:
Pedestrian deaths, including children, have risen in lockstep with light truck adoption in the United States, while they have fallen in countries without this phenomenon.
Vehicle emission and fuel efficiency standards are a great idea. The stupidity was allowing a "light truck" exception at all. It made the manufacturers turn to manufacturing and promoting what should be work vehicles to rich idiots who need nothing larger than a regular car (but can easily be upsold on something they don't need)
America is already fucked, given how awful its urban sprawl is. Trucks used for commuting and not haulage just makes it double fucked.
We shouldn't prohibit dumping toxic waste in the river, we should just tax it!
I am familiar with the EU situation. The carbon tax you would have needed to achieve the effect of fleet emission standards would have been political suicide.
And that is not just psychological. People who buy used cars and drive their cars until they fall apart are well correlated with people who can't afford high carbon tax. Buyers of new cars are the people who can. Carbon Tax would mean massive redistribution of the money raised. Yet another political mine field.
Not sure if you're facetious but there are plenty of examples of rising cigarettes' prices leading to reduction in smoking, or similarly a sugary soda tax reducing consumption of sugary soda (UK is a prime example).
Always gonna happen. Oil margins are gigantic and they'll use every dime of runway they can. Electric is better in every single way and batteries tech is only making that more true every day. The dinosaurs won't go quietly into the night.
Last year, China installed 1.5GW of nuclear and 300GW of renewables. China's total coal use decreased as they decommissioned and under-utilized more coal than they installed.
This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.
It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.
It's so boring to relitigate this constantly on HN. It's like debating whether the sky is blue. Ridiculous that this comes up so often.
However you may try to put lipstick on a pig, the core of the matter is unchanged. China's coal use decreased, and they barely install any nuclear compared to renewables.
For example China has strongly expanded in making liquid fuels from coal.
"China consumes about 380 million metric tons of coal as a feedstock for chemical and liquid fuel production, representing about 8% of the country’s total coal consumption of 4,939 million metric tons."
The amount of coal that China uses only as a feedstock for chemical and liquid fuel production is bigger than total coal consumption in Europe or total coal consumption in US.
Nuclear is useful but it's hard to see it as a panacea. Renewable energy on the other hand is hard to beat. The economics of it keeps getting better, and previous estimates of the lifecycle of things like solar was grossly misrepresented.
Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.
"Environmentalists" is a large, diverse group and nuclear energy has been a controversial topic splitting the group for decades.
Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.
Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.
The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.
Yes, and that dates from the era when everyone thought that a "nuclear winter" (from an exchange of nuclear bombs between the US and USSR) was a more immediate risk than a long slow problem of climate change. That's what the French government carried out a terrorist attack against Greenpeace in New Zealand for: the Rainbow Warrior was protesting against French nuclear weapons testing.
Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?
yes, but that is not the point. The point is that countries pursued uranium reactors as a priority to produce plutonium for weapons. It did not / does not have to be this way, and the conflation of all nuclear reactors as either being at risk of meltdown or linked to nuclear weapons has resulted in the current situation. The green movement did us all a disservice by choosing not to clarify the difference, and here we are in 2026 still burning coal, which continues to produce more radioactive waste than all the nuclear reactors ever built - and released directly into the environment!
There are many claims that Thorium fuel cycle is nuclear proliferation safe, it is safer but not perfectly safe. Uranium-233 bread during the Thorium fuel cycle can used to construct nuclear weapons
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances."
Many nuclear energy opponents require absolute nuclear proliferation safety.
I was under the impression that Carl Sagan basically made up the concept of nuclear winter because of his political alignment.
And, yes, every country should have nuclear power and nuclear deterrence. Please contrast how the US negotiated with North Korea and Libya. Or what happened to Ukraine after they denuclearized. You might be impressed at how palatable peace becomes when leadership has to consider their personal safety and not just cynical economic and political calculus in their use of force.
Please. Show me a nuke that was under 10 billion over budget and less than 20 years late.
Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.
If you look at how much time and money the French poured into their nuclear plant construction project (and several other pre-decommissioning issues) things look rather less rosy.
Also, it was a very high priority for France - keep in mind Napoleon's quote about the relative importance of moral and material.
More critically: The logic of "The French did {extremely complex thing} fairly well in the late 1900's, therefore we can also" is very similar to the logic of "SpaceX designs and operates reusable rockets with hundreds of launches per year and no failures, therefore we can also". NO, sorry, you are just fantasizing about rocket science somehow being easy for you. SpaceX has lots of highly motivated would-be competitors - many of them far better financed than SpaceX was - but the hard fact is that zero of those can actually do what SpaceX is doing.
The costs were not small, but probably smaller than the costs of German Energiewende. Messmer plan needed not only money, but also capable heavy industry and consistent political support.
Even if modern renewables and batteries kill the need for future nuclear power plants, that doesn't excuse the consequences of decades of burning fossil fuels because environmental groups fought against nuclear power altogether.
We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc.
The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
A lot of environmentalists are just degrowthers and NIMBYs. During the Biden administration multiple groups sued to block high voltage transmission lines for clean energy.
Because it’s a dangerous technology where profit over security can have severe consequences.
Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.
>Because it’s a dangerous technology where profit over security can have severe consequences.
Yeah it's far better to have power plants kill a steady stream of people, but in a banal way that's hard to attribute, like coal power plants causing lung cancer.
No, but hydroelectric works pretty well. There's a reason they recycle aluminum, etc. (power-hungry industries—crypto-mining, ha ha) along the Columbia River, etc.
So build your data centers there. No reason to choose the least evil.
Hydro electric as a resource is probably mostly exploited - are there a lot of big hydro projects left to build? If there are they must be difficult or expensive or they would have already been built.
Even ignoring nuclear environmentalists are still the enemy here.
Green energy is diffuse. Fields of solar. Ridges dotted with turbines. Each unit needs a power cable running away from it, access roads, etc, etc. A lot of area has to be developed for a given payback (sellable power).
Environmentalists and have been instrumental in making it economically impossible to develop land cheap enough to make low value density projects like that pencil out.
The higher power cost states in the US would likely be dotted with all manner of solar infill if not for up front costs that these shortsighted and selfish people have imposed on any land alteration larger than approx SFH lot size. Farmer Johnson would love nothing more than to put up solar on that ~2ac hillside he owns but cannot farm economically. Neither he nor some 3rd party who would put up the panels will shell out half a mil for an EPA CG permit just to clear the vegetation because the panels will never pay that back in their lives.
The economics of compliance are why the only greenfield development that happens these days is value dense commercial stuff (shopping plaza, big box store, data center, office buildings etc) or dense SFH development.
The most rosy possible outlook is that we "just" wait for the hippie boomers who cooked this crap up to croak, shit can the clean water act and come up with some new way of regulating development that doesn't saddle these super low impact projects (it's hard to be lower impact than panels or turbines) with fixed-ish costs that are a non-starter except at huge scale.
But of course there are so many parties who are making rent off this broken system who won't go down without a fight.
In history of the world there was almost never a reduction of greenhouse emissions. Only time that world did reduce greenhouse emissions was in times of economic crises and COVID-19.
Asia will do what US did in 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on July 15, 1979.
"Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun."
You’re part of the problem,
not the solution. There’s an entire political backlash against EVs because of mandates. The Trump Administration actually prevented California from having EV quotas.
Simply let in EVs from China and let American car companies go out of business.
There's a political backlash because Fox News and some Russian propaganda social media accounts told people to get angry and they did.
We have mandates against leaded fuel and excessively tinted windows and for child seats. We have mandates for airbags and seatbelts and bumper heights and crumple zones and turn signals.
EVs are better than gas cars in every way - less noise, less pollution, less dependency buying oil from the Middle East. Our policies, regulations and incentive structures should mirror that.
If this statement was generically true, nobody would smoke, nobody would play lotteries*, we'd all eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, everyone who was able to would exercise.
And some of the issues for EVs, like availability of chargers, go away by automatic action of the market when there's a good reason (e.g. government mandate for more EVs) to expect more demand for EVs.
* except on the occasions where the rollover boosted the expected value above the ticket price, but this would never happen if nobody ever played lotteries.
Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy.
Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.
Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape.
I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.
BK really destroyed the company and Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision. Pat was the visionary who saw the value of the fabs but it took a long time to turn things around.
>Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision
Let's be fair to Bob, he has the vision, but dont know how to execute it because he lacks the technical knowledge.
He was also the one who finally settled the argument I had for 5 years, if Intel were to made 250M Modem for Apple, where is the additional Capex for capacity expansion on their Fabs. The answer, only to be told by Bob in a 2020 interview was they never really planned for it.
>Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet.
Let's face it. Everything he cut, and products / department he sold were what he wanted to do on day one. He had to force his hand, make the stock price worst and ultimately force the board to allow him to do it.
You could argue he laid all the foundation for today's Intel to thrive.
Yes, I am pointing the fingers at the board. Although words on the street was the board also have their hands tied as they were also beholden to large institutional investors. It is all a Game of Cards.
I don't understand what you mean. Stock price has tripled since last August based on Intel finally having a competitive architecture and a competitive process again, no? At least that in combination with various geopolitical circumstances. Sounds like Pat's decision resulted in Intel's stock price rising?
Much like a president, most of their decisions take years to really be felt. The major changes Pat made weren’t going to change the balance sheet for years.
What exactly has Intel done that’s dramatically different than Pat’s vision that you feel is increasing share price?
Or is it just that they sold their soul to Trump combined with Pat’s choices finally bearing fruit?
It is a bit simplistic to assume that more money translates into better research outcomes.
Alzheimer's is a warning tale. Lots of money flowed into research of this condition, and was mostly wasted on a flawed hypothesis supported by scientific VIPs who had a face to lose in case it proved incorrect.
We don't necessarily need more money in research, but smarter ways of spending it. The current grant system rewards established players and reliable production of mediocre (or even fraudulent) papers over honest failure and actual innovation too much.
Governments have a limited (although large) budget, and no incentive to spend it well[1]. You don't get promoted as a government administrator if you approve a Nobel-prize-winning grannt.
If you don't get rewarded for good work but may get punished for taking risks, you optimize for risk minimization, even if this means a lot of potentially-good work not getting done.
Nobody blames the FDA when millions of people die from the-medicine-hasn't-been-invented-yet-itis, everybody blames the FDA when ten or so people die from a side effect nobody saw. This impacts FDA policy.
This person has the best incentive there is in the world, the incentive to live. He didn't care whether the people getting his money correctly filled form 437-F, or whether they have the relevant paperwork that verifies their legitimacy in a way which can be described by legal rules.
[1] Incidentally, finance has (had?) the opposite problem. If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage * profit_generated), you will maximize risk, optimizing for bets that give you great returns most of the time, but wipe you out completely some of the time, as your losses are clamped to 0.
No we absolutely don't. The US hardly spends anything on research.
The entire yearly budget for the National Cancer Institute is $7 billion dollars. To put this in perspective, that's 3 days of funding the DoD. For cancer. That kills well over half a million Americans per year.
The takeaway is that we should invest in research rather than letting people die.
> The US government [...] could find that amount of money every year.
Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.
You can't compare the output of small teams driven by a fanatic with a single output metric with government funded research. NIH invests about 40 billion in research a year in the US as it is I believe.
Do we just keep increasing spending until the marginal value of further spending goes to zero so long as the next incremental dollar "isn't a big deal?"
We’re rolling back CAFE standards too.
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