General public ignorance of the strides made in reducing vehicle emissions during the last 20 years has made it possible for President Clinton to endorse expensive new regulations desired by the Environmental Protection Agency without being laughed off the stage - or at least having a cabbage or two chucked in his general direction.
On Saturday, during his weekly radio address, the president urged the adoption of new pollution controls for "light trucks" - a category of vehicles that includes sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and minivans, as well as pickups. The president claimed the costs associated with these new controls - $4.4 billion by EPA's reckoning and therefore likely to be 2-3 times that amount in reality -would reduce light-truck emissions "by 80 percent" from their current levels.
But emissions percentages, like money, are fungible - especially when run through the Clinton calculator. That "80 percent" figure cited by the president and by the EPA is accurate in a way -just as the Earth appears kind of flat when viewed from a certain perspective.
However, when one takes into account that the automakers have already cleaned up the exhaust stream of the vehicles they build - including light trucks - to the extent that 95-98 percent of what comes out of the tailpipe is harmless water vapor and carbon dioxide, the silliness of the president's proposal becomes apparent.
The truly harmful stuff that creates smog and respiratory problems for people - oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide - have been virtually eliminated from new vehicles, thanks to 3-way catalytic converters, fuel injection and engine controllers with more computing power than the Apollo 17 lunar module.
Thus, Mr. Clinton's "80 percent" is really 80 percent of the remaining 2-5 percent of new car emissions that remain "dirty" - representing an overall improvement of perhaps 1 percent or so overall. This is pretty inconsequential when viewed against that $4.4 billion price tag - an amount that works out to several hundred dollars in additional costs per vehicle.
Far better for the environment would be policies that make clean-running, environmentally sound new vehicles cheaper rather than more expensive to buy. That way, people would have more incentive to trade in their filthy old clunkers - cars built before the adoption of catalytic converters and modern engine management systems that constitute less than 2 percent of the nations' vehicle fleet but which create more pollution per car than an entire fleet of brand-new SUVs.
But these days good sense and sound public policy spend less time together than the president and the first lady.
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