Diminishing returns to increasing car MPG?

Diminishing returns to increasing car MPG?

costbenefitanalysis Energy Environment Regulation

The Eco adds apparently $1,600 to the price of the Malibu (with a sales tax of 7 percent that comes up to $1,712). Suppose that people spend about $2,900 on gas over the course of a year and that this 2 mpg increase represents a 7.7% increase (from 26 combined mpg to 28), it would take about 7.67 years to make up the $1,712 (and that assumes that the interest rate is zero).  A 3 percent interest rate will make it take about 10 years to pay this back.  Any repair costs would add to the number of years it would take before one breaks even.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

On the nonhybrid side, the poster car for conventional fuel-efficiency excellence is Chevrolet's own Cruze Eco, which returns a government-rated 28 m.p.g. in town and 42 on the highway without any electrical assistance. Instead, the Cruze Eco uses a small turbocharged engine, a manual transmission and old-fashioned tricks like lightweight forged wheels.
The Malibu Eco is a larger, more powerful car, but its mileage numbers are a long way off the nonhybrid Cruze, at 25 m.p.g. city and 37 m.p.g. highway. The Cruze Eco even has more trunk space than the Malibu Eco because there's no battery pack beneath the carpeting.
While the Environmental Protection Agency hasn't released final numbers for the new base Malibu, I can't imagine that the Eco will beat it by more than 2 m.p.g. For comparison, the old 4-cylinder Malibu netted a combined city-highway rating of 26 m.p.g., while the 2013 Eco returns 29 m.p.g. combined. The Camry Hybrid beats both Chevys with a combined rating of 41 m.p.g.
Even the 2013 Nissan Altima, with a conventional nonhybrid powertrain, improves on the Malibu Eco by 2 m.p.g., with a combined city-highway estimate of 31. . . . .

So if geoengineering works, how much does that reduce any claimed externality from carbon emissions?

So if geoengineering works, how much does that reduce any claimed externality from carbon emissions?

costbenefitanalysis GlobalWarming

Reducing the direct sunlight reaching the ground by 20 percent seems like a pretty large effect to me.  Will the claimed necessity of a carbon tax be adjusted for this possibility?  Personally, I think that warmer weather on net produces more good than bad.  From New Scientist:

Blue skies would fade to hazy white if geoengineers inject light-scattering aerosols into the upper atmosphere to offset global warming. Critics have already warned that this might happen, but now the effect has been quantified.
Releasing sulphate aerosols high in the atmosphere should in theory reduce global temperatures by reflecting a small percentage of the incoming sunlight away from the Earth. However, the extra particles would also scatter more of the remaining light into the atmosphere. This would reduce by 20 per cent the amount of sunlight that takes a direct route to the ground, and it would increase levels of softer, diffuse scattered light, says Ben Kravitz of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. . . . .

This article in Climatic Change (2006) indicates that this effect can be achieved at a cost of $25 to $50 billion.  

This can be achieved by a continuous deployment of about 1–2 Tg S per year for a total price of US $25–50 billion . . . . 

Compare that to the carbon taxes being proposed for just the United States.  Here is a proposal by Obama that talked about the tax revenue amounting to $80 billion a year.  I have no estimate of the deadweight loss.  From the WSJ:

The cost of energy for consumers would be driven higher in President Barack Obama's proposed budget by a carbon cap-and-trade system that is projected to raise about $80 billion a year starting in 2012. . . .The budget projects raising $645 billion from the auction of emissions credits between 2012, when the system kicks in, and 2019. . . .

The US would probably find it preferable to put the sulphur in the atmosphere all on its own. 


More information is available here.