Triangle Sustainability Blog

The federal government’s cash for clunkers program (known officially now as the Car Allowance Rebate System or CARS), was sold to the public as a way to improve the fuel economy of America’s auto fleet. But are we really getting a decent energy bang for our buck?

Recent reports by the Associated Press have noted that the most common trade-in/purchase combo was swapping an old Ford F-150 truck for a new Ford F-150. A light duty truck like the F-150 has a “full useful life” of around 120,000 miles, according to the EPA. So an old F-150 truck that got 15 mpg and was traded in for one that gets 17 mpg would lead to a total savings of around 950 gallons of gasoline. That equates to emissions savings of a bit more than 18,000 lbs of CO² during a typical truck’s lifespan.

To most people, 950 gallons of gas sounds like a decent amount of energy savings. But lets consider what we could get if we spent that money elsewhere. The clunkers rebates ranged from $3,500 to $4,500 based on what was being traded in and what was being purchased. I’ll be conservative and say I was going to trade in my old F-150 for a new one and would receive only the minimum $3,500 rebate.

So what if I was allowed to use that $3,500 on other types of energy savings, such as installing a solar photovoltaic system? For that amount of money, I could get a 2 kilowatt solar system installed on my roof (keep in mind that’s after accounting for various other federal and state incentive programs that greatly reduce the total cost of the system).

My solar system will surpass the carbon savings from the cash for clunkers truck upgrade in about 4 years time. Not a bad deal, considering the solar panels should run for 20 to 25 years and will also pay for themselves in about 9 years time. So not only do I displace a lot more carbon over the life of the panels, I also recoup my investment and start making money after a while.

Another option is to put the $3,500 directly towards buying carbon offsets. In North Carolina we have a cool program run by NC GreenPower that allows me to buy 500 lbs of CO² offsets for about $4 per month. So using that program I could displace 437,500 lbs of CO², about 24 times as much as in the cash for clunkers program.

You can, reasonably, argue that the government already has lots of incentive programs in place for solar or that buying carbon offsets doesn’t provide me with a tangible benefit, like getting a new car.

But the real point is that – despite the government’s efforts to say otherwise – it’s ludicrous to claim that cash for clunkers is about energy savings and making a dent in carbon emissions. If it was then buying a truck wouldn’t have been an option at all. The program was about getting money to struggling car manufacturers with the taxpayers picking up the tab, and the cause of climate change getting little more than lip service.

Tags: cash for clunkers, energy efficiency, NC GreenPower, sustainability

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 8:31 pm and is filed under sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.