Skip to main content

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door...

...apparently to beat your damn head in.

Wired has this hand-wringing report that all the environmentalists and economists are all worried about the potential mass sales of India's new $2,500-car, the Tata Nano.

The Nano doesn't go on sale until fall, but already environmentalists say it will bring big increases in carbon dioxide emissions and pollution. "This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial proportions," Yale environmental law professor Daniel Esty told Newsweek. Some energy experts say all those new cars will increase demand for gasoline, with one telling CNN, "we'll get into a situation where we'll have to compete with them for gasoline, $4, $5 a gallon. Who knows how high we could go?"

It would be easy to denounce the naysayers as western do-gooders with no moral standing to criticize India. But the most vocal critics include Indians who say the Nano will deepen the country's critical pollution, infrastructure and traffic woes.


Wired (which regular readers will remember for advocating not opt-out but actual mandatory organ donation) doesn't waste any time examining things like upward mobility or better access to jobs and health care....

The part that truly gets me about this piece of supposed journalism is how it treats the actual environmental performance of the Nano:

At first glance it looks like an eco-friendly ride. It has a 623 cc engine that produces 33 horsepower, gets close to 50 mpg, meets Euro III emissions standards and according to the Economist should be able to meet tougher Euro IV standards "with a bit of tweaking."


The second glance is a bit more peevish:

But the prospect of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Nanos on the road worries environmentalists. India's Economic Times says the Nano potentially could expand the country's auto market by 65 percent and spur a 20 percent increase in auto sales in its first year. Honda, Toyota and Fiat are among the companies developing competitors to the Nano. The proliferation of cheap vehicles could prompt as much as 25 percent of the 50 million people who ride scooters to buy cars, the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi says.

India is the world's fourth-largest overall producer of the greenhouse gas (it ranks far lower in per-capita terms). Its carbon emissions are expected to triple by 2020, according to the United Nations, and climate experts are only beginning to ponder what the "Nano effect" may mean for the global environment.

"In none of our reports did we assume there'd be a car like this," Judi Greenwald, a researcher with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told Newsweek. "This is a new category. It will effect everybody's projections."

The Center for Science and Environment warns more cars will only exacerbate congestion and smog-related illnesses in a country where 57 percent of cities already face critical levels of air pollution.


I love this--the Tata is a disaster because we scientists neglected to allow for technological innovation in our forecasts.

Hidden away and discounted is the counter-argument from Tata Motors:

Tata counters that the Nano is cleaner than the scooters it will replace and claims the car's catalytic converter cuts emissions by 80 percent. The Nano supposedly emits 30 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer, well below the 160 g/km average of Europe's cars and far less than the 130 g/km standard the European Union will adopt in 2012. Even if half a million Nano's hit the road and each of them travels 5,000 miles a year, they will be responsible for less than 8 percent of India's annual CO2 emissions, Economic Times reports.


Lost in all of this hoopla (in fact never recorded at all by Wired) is the fact that Tata has spent years developing green programs and outsourcing much of its parts business and support materials to small, family-owned cooperatives run by the relatives of its workers, or that Tata is now developing purely battery-operated light pick-up for sale in the American market.

If climate change containment policies not only mandate carbon cutbacks in industrializing nations, but also stifle the upward mobility of the emerging middle class in places like India, China, and Brazil, any so-called international accord is going to unravel pretty damn fast.

Comments

Jim Fryar said…
I need to get some shares in that.
Anonymous said…
These guys (Wired) must have been paid to say this. by whom I wonder...

If they were not paid then it is sadder still and these guys really believe the s**t they're saying

yet another US hypocrisy and misinformation for the Believers.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...