I ran across an editorial in Investors Business Daily (IBD) last week that caught my eye. It was the third in a series entitled “Breaking the Back of High Oil”. If you are not familiar with the newspaper, it is geared to the investment community. Its viewpoint is admittedly conservative. I find it to be a good source for investment information, but a poor source for scientific information or opinion.

Needless-to-say this editorial made a lot of sense. It described a program in California started in the 1990s called a voluntary vehicle retirement program. The gist of the program was to offer $1,000 to low-income car owner whose cars did not pass the emission’s requirements. The owner could accept the cash toward a newer vehicle or repair their old vehicle at their own expense.

The purpose of the program was to retire the older more polluting vehicles. The editorial claimed that “a mere 10% of the country’s almost 140 million privately owned cars and light-duty trucks account for more that half of the auto pollution.” I have not verified this figure, but if true, then it makes sense to get older vehicles off the road. The suggestion in IBD was to start with vehicles prior to 1989 and move it ahead one year every January.

How many clunkers have you seen on the road in South Carolina? How well do you think they have been maintained in a state that does not have annual inspections? Would this work in South Carolina?

I think that it would work in this state in spite of no inspections. The way it might be envisioned would be a voluntary program where initially the state would offer low-income owners $1,000 for vehicles 20 years of age and older. This would certainly be more than they could get on the market. It would also get the older gas guzzlers and polluters off the road. They don’t have to buy new vehicles just newer used vehicles. The IBD article mentioned that the old vehicles in California were replaced with car’s having an average age of 10 years. A higher figure offered to low-income owners might make sense to get them off the road faster.

This proposal has merit regardless of your views on global warming. It certainly important to get cars older than 1978 off the road as this was the year tighter fuel standards went into effect. I agree with IBD that this would be faster and more effective at saving fuel than waiting for the tighter fleet standards that don’t go into effect until 2015.

Governor Mark Sanford’s Climate Change working group is currently working on proposals to improve the environment. This is one I believe they should seriously consider. If you agree, I encourage you to contact the governor’s office. Go to Scrap the Guzzlers/a> to see the editorial at Investors Business Daily.