Scrap The Guzzlers

One way to bring down the soaring price of gasoline is to decrease demand. We can do that fairly painlessly by taking older, less fuel-efficient cars off the road.

In the 1990s, California launched a voluntary vehicle retirement program. In some air quality management districts, owners of older, gross-polluting cars are paid cash to scrap them.

The state also pays out $1,000 to low-income car owners who would rather scrap their vehicles than pay for the repairs required to pass the state’s smog test. Gross polluters caught by remote sensing devices are also offered $1,000 for their cars.

The average age of the cars retired in these local programs is 18 years. They are replaced with cars that are, on average, 10 years old, one year older than the average of the state’s fleet.

With fewer old cars on the road and more cars nearer the average age, emissions are reduced.

So why not something similar on the national level? We would expect gasoline use to fall