Detroit will respond by subsidizing gas prices more.

GM newest effort = $1000 E85 fuel card promotion for their dinos

I heard diesel is actually cheaper and easier to produce than regular gasoline, plus diesel engines are more efficient than their counterpart ICE. Plus biodiesel is less harmful to the enviroment. Can anyone comment on that?

There is no Clean Diesel. ALL vehicle ICE's should have to meet Best Available Control Technology. That means
A california PZEV-AT for gasoline. SO many grams of pollution per mile or per Kw-Hr or BHP-Hr. Anything more than that does not meet specs.
I am a realist and understand the SCR urea (Adblue) is the best we are going to get for trucks, boats, ships etc, but for cars and other light duty engines, why pollute 10 times as much to get a 30% fuel savings?
Using Natural gas in a CNG or LNG optimized engine, taking advantage of the higher octane rating, would lower your costs 30%...
For those of you not too familar with the EPA, try to get a new plant permitted telling them you are going to make more pollution but it is going to save you money and see how far you get.
Major companies lost this battle 30 years ago, only a few industries are still getting away with it other than cars. Off road vehicles, pleasure boats, Large ships. The car companies have had the best congress they could buy (Dingell) and they have been able to get public, support to keep polluting.

iPadula -

"I am a realist and understand the SCR urea (Adblue) is the best we are going to get for trucks, boats, ships etc, but for cars and other light duty engines, why pollute 10 times as much to get a 30% fuel savings?"

The US uses 25% of the world's crude oil, some 20 million barrels per day. About two-thirds of that is used in the transportation sector, about 12 million barrels a day. If it were possible for all US on-road vehicles to make do with 30% less, 3-4 billion barrels per day would not be needed there. This is Iraq's current oil production two or three times over, or about half of Saudi Arabia's.

Reduced US demand would burst the speculative bubble hanging over oil markets, re-establish spare oil production capacity to go up and Saudi Arabia to resume its moderating role within OPEC. Iran could no longer get away with its brinkmanship on the nuclear issue. Venezuela would have to moderate its attitude. Plus, the US' CO2 footprint becomes smaller, denying others (e.g. China) the option of flying under the radar.

Diesels are one way to get there, hybrids another. There are other options as well, each with its pros and cons for the various market segments. It would be nice if consumers could choose rather than have the government deny them any options.

The point is that air quality is important but so is total consumption. You have multiple conflicting objectives and need to balance them, find a sensible compromise.

The total integration of life styles can be found in the recent study showing even poor Brits have better health then rich Americans. It really shows the differences of government policies.

Yes, Joseph, again.

What's YOUR explaination for it?

What's ridiculous is to ignore empirical data. NOx is reduced by an average 40%-50% on weekends, yet urban ozone (smog) levels not only don't decline, they often increase. It's not a theory, it's demonstrable fact.

Why is the only “solution” to “increase” ambient NOx levels? I certainly don’t advocate that. Wouldn’t it be more logical to decrease NOx emissions slowly while dramatically decreasing VOC and CO emissions, almost exactly the opposite of what the Tier 2/LEV II regs mandate (something through which increased use of clean diesels could be achieved)? And I would suggest including evaporative emissions (VOCs) in all the regulatory Bins and classifications, not just the PZEV classification (diesel fuel is virtually non-volatile relative to gasoline, thus there are essentially no “smog-forming” evaporative emissions from diesel vehicles). While it’s true that ambient NOx levels can be reduced to a point where they become the limiting factor, modeling has shown that it will require nearly an order-of-magnitude reduction overall, something that’s not attainable in the foreseeable future in urban locations.

Speaking of pollution, why do the current Tier 2/LEV II regs do essentially nothing about CO emissions from the previous regulatory iteration (Tier 1)? Tier 2 mandates a reduction of over an order-of-magnitude for NOx from Tier 1 (effectively since the fleet average has to meet Bin 5), a “tailpipe” reduction in NMHC (VOCs) by a factor of about 3, and no (zero) reductions mandated for CO. Isn’t CO “pollution”? CO is highly toxic and an ozone precursor, and there areas of the southwestern U.S. that are still in “serious” nonattainment with the CO NAAQS (http://www.epa.gov/oar/oaqps/greenbk/mapco.html). The nonattainment with the CO NAAQS should have been justification for a mandated reduction in CO emissions by itself, never mind that CO is an ozone precursor. By the way, there are no areas in the U.S. that are currently in nonattainment with the NO2 NAAQS (http://www.epa.gov/oar/oaqps/greenbk/nindex.html), so the regulatory assault on NOx is not warranted for that reason.

I stand by my assertion that the weekend effect casts considerable doubt on the potential effectiveness of the Tier 2/LEV II regs, and that clean diesel vehicles should be encouraged, not regulatorily discouraged, if clean air is truly the goal.

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