scott wrote:
>>> How come people can still drive around Hummers that do 10mpg then?
>>
>> Either they are trucks and so exempt
> 
> Aren't there limits for trucks too?

I imagine so, but it's not "average over fleet" as far as I know, which 
is what was hurting the auto manufacturers. If they wanted to build 15% 
large cars, they had to build 15% of their cars using less gas than was 
physically possible.  With trucks, all the trucks can be right at the 
limit. Apparently, many in Congress own trucking companies.

> turns out that actually there are a lot of cars (in Europe at least) 
> that get better fuel economy and give out less pollution.

I wouldn't be surprised. I was kind of disappointed that the Prius will 
actually sacrifice mileage in order to reduce pollution.

>> Yep. And China pollutes more than the USA. :-)
> 
> Only just, and their population is considerably larger than yours (plus 
> they make everything for the rest of the world) so it's hardly reason to 
> not take any action in your own country. 

Well, we *do* take action in our own country, just not due to Europe's 
direction. :-)  And the pollution from China is getting worse as they 
move into 1st world status. (As in, they're not quite there yet, so they 
don't have the luxury of wasting money on stuff like pollution controls 
yet, but they're starting to use energy like a first world country does.)

> It's not just me, but everyone 
> here has the impression that the USA is doing very little to cut down on 
> pollution, maybe it's just the impression that Bush gives when he talks 
> about such things, or that they always choose to interview certain 
> people on the TV here, I don't know.

Certainly all the interviewers have agendas.  Part of the problem is 
that the USA already paid a whole lot of attention to pollution stuff 
like 30 years ago. We put scrubbers on all the smoke stacks, treat the 
coal before burning it, and so on. We use a lot of energy, but the 
country is spread out, large and a fairly big population.

We could probably do better by reducing the amount of energy we use, but 
that's not something Kyoto is going to be able to cause to happen, methinks.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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