I feel so much better now that I know that "European investigators" are on the case. That'll make a huge difference, as it has so many times in the past like ... and ...

"European investigators" are on the case. Their all over it for sure, so in about 60 years and 300 million euros, a PC statement will reveal that because France did not create it, it causes damage to the health of the community.

I have had both U.S. Federal government departments and their European Community counterparts as my customers, and I have to say based on many years of experience with both of them that the U.S. Government is a smoothly running, hyper-efficient machine compared to the EC bureaucracy.

On the other hand, the protection of citizens' health that we used to have here in the U.S. has now been taken over by the Europeans.

For example, the ROHS requirements that outlawed sales in Europe of electronics with components that were dangerous to the environment in use or when recycled were simply banned. Because manufacturers don't want to make a separate version for the U.S. market, we get the benefit of that here also. The simplest change was leadless soldering of circuitboards, which after a lot of initial squealing and whining turned out to be great even for the manufacturers.

Ditto in clean-air, where the EC is decades ahead of the U.S. One blatant example is that Europe has truck and car diesel engines that pollute a tiny tiny fraction of diesels sold here. Unfortunately you can't import those engines here. They would be clobbered after the first fill-up, because our standards for diesel fuel allow 50 times more sulphur and crud than in Europe.

Belatedly, this will change here also. I think from the start of 2007 diesel fuel standards will be slowly tightened, and this will allow U.S. manufacturers to start making cleaner diesels that have better fuel economy and reduce pollution hugely compared to the slag heaps of the past.

BMW even makes diesel-powered race cars going something like 150 mph at 35 mpg (I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were astonishing).

Actually air quality in the United States has dramatically improved in the past three decades, as has water quality. Lake Erie was all but dead in 1968; it is once again a functioning lake. Los Angeles smog would burn your lungs in just a few hours back in that same timeframe (my wife grew up there, and I used to visit); that is seldom the case now.

The EPAs own statistics bear this out:

Air Emissions Trends - Continued Progress Through 2005

All this improvement has happened despite the fact the we have almost doubled the number of vehicle miles traveled (see the chart). Thus we have half the pollutants, with almost twice the number of cars. This is due not to government mandates, most of which were completely ineffective when they were first passed as legislation back in the early 1970s, but instead is due to the incredible luck of having the microprocessor invented and then cost-reduced to the point where we could have a computer in the engine of every car. That in turn permitted amazing advances in how gasoline was burned. This not only reduced pollution but permitted amazing advances in fuel economy. Computer modeling of engine operation permitted further burning efficiencies which is why automobile mileage has gotten so much better in the past forty years (see the following chart from the EPA):

Passenger Car and Motorcycle Fuel Consumption and Travel

Of course this will come as news to many people who only listen to doomsayers on the daily newscasts, but all you have to do is actually use your own memory cells (if you live in a big city) to remember how awful it was back then compared to now. My father's 1968 Oldsmobile station wagon got eight miles to the gallon (my dad was an engineer, like me, and he measured mpg at every fill-up). He was absolutely horrified, and got rid of the car in less than two years. Even the Chevy Suburban (15/19 mpg) isn't that bad, and it is a pig of a gas hog.

Of course the situation could be even better if people who didn't really need SUVs and other too-large, fuel inefficient vehicles would instead drive something more sensible. Fortunately, one of the few benefits to the rapid increase in fuel costs will be the rather rapid change in what people choose to drive. This will increase fuel economy even further, and decrease pollution. The government, as usual, will have absolutely zero to do with this. Instead, as usual, economics will make it happen. T

he point is that the idiots that run most governments on this planet think they can legislate innovation (which is required to fix most problems such as pollution or fuel consumption) but that's just not the way things work. Their attempts to intervene in DVD standards or in Apple's desire to link iTunes and iPod (which the same idiots in the Euro government decided to do) are similarly misguided and stupid, and will not benefit any consumer.