Uncertain about the big automaker bailout? I give you KC Golden of Climate Solutions, in a Seattle P-I op-ed:
Saving GM under any circumstances is a hard swallow. This is the company whose Vice Chairman Bob Lutz says “global warming is a total crock of s – – -.”
GM sent a posse of executives and lobbyists to Olympia to fight Washington’s Clean Car Act in 2006, a law that will reduce climate pollution from new cars by 30 percent and save Washington consumers more than $2 billion in fuel costs.
And:
The market wants efficient cars; the engineers can produce them; the law requires them. But GM’s lawyers and executives fight on for their right to commit commercial suicide and planetary ecocide, even as they descend on Congress, cup in hand.
Come again—why should we dig deep to save a company that seems so resolutely determined to destroy itself, taking the economy and the planet down with it?
Go read the whole thing here.
Plus, if that’s not enough GM reading, you can take a look at Thomas Friedman’s latest, which also appears in the P-I today. It’s excellent.
sf
So maybe instead of a direct bailout there could be a government rebate directly to consumers who buy fuel efficient cars made in America, on a sliding scale with a really good rebate for the volt when it comes out. Add a little extra for customers who can prove that their old gas guzzler is being junked. Combine that with a tariff on cars and trucks from countries that provide health insurance. And yeah, if there is any cash directly to GM, apply a heavy government hand to both management and labor.
Matt the Engineer
Great ideas [SF] (though I assume you meant “that don’t provide health insurance”).I’d love to find a way to shift from car production to train/light rail/streetcar production. Add wind turbine production etc. but that’s straying a bit from the machinery and talent in these vehicle plants. Of course, we should keep them producing any fuel-efficient vehicles as well.
SF
National Health insurance gives a foreign auto company a competitive edge. They pay part of the cost of this insurance through their taxes, but GM pays all of the cost of its employee health insurance as a direct labor cost, plus the cost of its retiree health insurance, which is a huge burden since the size of the current work force is much smaller. So you would impose a tariff (seems like about $1,300, I read somewhere) on foreign made autos from countries that do have national health insurance.
carfreeliving
How about rebates for people who buy bicycles and monthly bus passes? What about them?