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

Yeh I was surprised, because the pollution levels are quite low for a car 
that size (what I saw was that only a couple of cars beat it, which were 
smaller).  But then the gas mileage is really not that good compared to what 
a lot of cars here can do.  Maybe they could work with VW or BMW to use one 
of their really efficient diesel engines, that is where the European 
manufacturers have made great strides in the last decade.

> 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.

Well it seems to have helped a lot of other countries reduce their pollution 
quite significantly, whether they would have done it without Kyoto I don't 
know.  The fact is that Kyoto won't let you get away with not reducing 
pollution levels very easily.

If LA has such a bad smog situation then why not ban all cars that produce 
over a certain amount of pollution to improve the air quality?  You 
pioneered with the emission controls 30 years ago, but you seem to have been 
overtaken by most other developed countries now (eg here you can't enter 
most cities without the correct colour sticker on your car, which depends on 
how much pollution it makes).  If the pollution situation gets bad in a 
city, then they can simply ban everyone with bigger cars from entering to 
keep within the air quality limits.

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