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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Slagle who wrote (6277)	5/11/2006 3:18:36 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 220180

Slag, having experienced disgusting air, and pure air, I am very happy with pollution controls in cities. As you point out, it's absurd to worry about pollution in the outback, and force farmers to keep their exhaust clean. It's the old one-size fits all political process. In Europe, I got into arguments with the European government which was trying to force fuel standards from Sweden to Gibraltar. Diesel and petrol are climate dependent. Octane number requirement varies greatly from cold to hot climates and from low altitude to high altitude. Similarly, what is a good diesel fuel for a rural heavy haulage truck in a hot, poor country like Turkey is completely unsuitable for a cold, wealthy, city commuter car in Stockholm or Hamburg. The car fuel could cost twice as much as the truck fuel and still make economic sense. A petrol suitable for a high performance car zooming down a 200 kph highway in Germany on a hot summer's day is quite different from petrol suitable for a cheap little commuter car in Salamanca. To force everyone to use the same fuel is dopey. Oil companies judge the balance of their customers and technologies and supply what they think will do a good enough job and sell well and maximize profits. Cities and states set pollution standards to protect people on the wrong end of the exhaust pipe. I do NOT want to be breathing or swallowing lead. Including lead in petrol was one of the world's large 20th century blunders. Thalidomide and asbestos as problems were insignificantly trivial by comparison. There used to be nearly a gram of lead in each litre of petrol. Each car used about 2000 litres of petrol a year. So each car was spraying 2kg of fine lead each year. When you consider that there were a LOT of cars and they were doing their spraying over crops and cities, there was a LOT of lead in the air getting into people. The damage was about quarter of an IQ point, which doesn't sound much until you calculate the value of an IQ point. Which is easily done [compare incomes of people with IQ 100 with those of IQ 120 and you get the answer]. Mqurice