Having more efficient (and probably phallic shaped) vehicles could reduce aggregate emissions ... or, more likely, the lower cost of driving could increase how often it's done.
Unless the newer efficiency is combined with laws that make emissions directly more costly, you're ultimately just bailing from one side of the pool to the other.
But then, if you're going to put those laws in place, then you don't need to reward any one specific technology's creation; you've already incentivized (sorry) any emission-reducing change in behavior, which is a far longer list than any bureaucrat or contest-creator can come up with. Unless, of course, you think that we're going to have separate contests for "make the average distance of worker from workplace less than one mile" or "make average driving distance less than 11k miles/person-year", etc etc etc.
Projects like the "car with ultra-high gas mileage" are instances of a very unproductive mentality when it comes to responsible environmental stewardship: it's a mentality that, stripped of misdirection, says "it's okay to be wasteful, as long as you're wasteful with efficient technology".
>Projects like the "car with ultra-high gas mileage" are instances of a very unproductive mentality when it comes to responsible environmental stewardship
This is an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. To a partisan all pragmatism is bad.
It's more like "feel-good being the enemy of the good". Without other good policies, a more efficient car has ~zero expected benefit. With the other good policies, the more efficient car is marginally relevant.
The bizarro world where improved efficiency of coal use led to more coal use, rather than people miraculously keeping the same pattern of behavior despite the increased utility of using coal?
The bizarro world where nobody ever increases their fuel use in response to its greater effectiveness of use?
The bizarro world where people can feel like they've said something insightful simply because they're advocating greater fuel efficiency regardless of how poorly they understand the system in which it operates?
If your goal is purely to reduce amount of oil being burned, then making it impractically expensive to use oil-burning machines works. Making them extremely inefficient is one way to go about this.
Of course they are, but increasing efficiency is only loosely related to that, due to Jevons Effects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Having more efficient (and probably phallic shaped) vehicles could reduce aggregate emissions ... or, more likely, the lower cost of driving could increase how often it's done.
Unless the newer efficiency is combined with laws that make emissions directly more costly, you're ultimately just bailing from one side of the pool to the other.
But then, if you're going to put those laws in place, then you don't need to reward any one specific technology's creation; you've already incentivized (sorry) any emission-reducing change in behavior, which is a far longer list than any bureaucrat or contest-creator can come up with. Unless, of course, you think that we're going to have separate contests for "make the average distance of worker from workplace less than one mile" or "make average driving distance less than 11k miles/person-year", etc etc etc.
Projects like the "car with ultra-high gas mileage" are instances of a very unproductive mentality when it comes to responsible environmental stewardship: it's a mentality that, stripped of misdirection, says "it's okay to be wasteful, as long as you're wasteful with efficient technology".