[ThTh1] In my previous post on Trump’s cabinet nominations, I mentioned I’d get to RFK, Jr. Well … it’s time to talk about RFK, Jr. who has been nominated to one of the most powerful positions in government, the head of Health and Human Services.
I’ll put aside his personal behavior which includes accusations of sexual assault, a series of affairs that drove his wife to suicide and his rather infamous escapade with a bear. Any of these would be a problem for a normal nominee, but with RFK, Jr., they represent the upside.
Instead, let’s focus on his embrace of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Ten years ago, when RFK was the darling of “progressives”, Walter Olson wrote about his embrace of kooky ideas:
A couple of years ago, he put his name to a book entitled Crimes Against Nature, in whose pages we learn, among many similar revelations, that air pollution is a cause of Down’s Syndrome and that “automakers already have the technology” to make SUVs and minivans get the mileage of passenger cars, but don’t do so because, well, because they’re mean.
More recently, Kennedy has moved on to conspiracy theorizing about supposed Republican theft of the 2004 and other elections, writing that has been described even by a semi-admirer like GristMill’s David Roberts as “overheated work” that may have “served to discredit more modest but verifiable theories.”
RFK claimed that hog farmers were a bigger threat to American than Al-Qaeda. He has called for journalists and industrialists to be prosecuted for disagreeing with the scientific consensus on global warming. The NYT has a rundown of his penchant for conspiracy theories, which includes claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS, that the COVID virus spares Jews and Asians1He tried to defend this in Twitter by linking to a paper that talked about genetic susceptibility to COVID but said nothing about race., that chemicals turn people transgender and that the CIA killed his uncle.
This is all very relevant to his proposed role at HHS. Kennedy is most famous for becoming a big promoter of the idea that vaccines cause autism. This claim was based on a now-retracted fraudulent study of a dozen children. It has been debunked by studies of millions of children. This has not stopped him from continuing or promote this garbage or comparing vaccine mandates to sexual abuse. The result has been a decline in vaccination rates and an explosion of children getting seriously ill or dying.
The evidence against a link between vaccines and autism is profound.2And no, we do not give children heavier vaccines laods than ever. In fact, there is now a tentative link between autism and unvaccinated mothers. His continued insistence on this point represents either ignorance of unprincipled grifting from someone who makes $20,000 a week promoting this tommyrot. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which is a more likely description of a Harvard graduate.
And that is just the top of the iceberg:
His attacks have grown more sweeping, with Kennedy suggesting he will clear out “entire departments” at FDA, including the agency’s food and nutrition center. The program is responsible for preventing foodborne illness, promoting health and wellness, reducing diet-related chronic disease and ensuring chemicals in food are safe.
Last month, Kennedy threatened on social media to fire FDA employees for “aggressive suppression” of a host of unsubstantiated products and therapies, including stem cells, raw milk, psychedelics and discredited COVID-era treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Something to keep in mind going forward: there are scientists who think bird flu is jumping to humans via raw milk. There is a very real possibility of another pandemic being initiated by the very people whose skepticism made the last one worse.
RFK has promised to remove fluoride from drinking water. He is opposed to Ozempic, which is showing great promise in helping people use diet and exercise to lose weight. He wants exercise and “fresh air” to be used to treat thing like diabetes and depression.
But perhaps most alarmingly, he has promised to put half of NIH’s research budget toward alternative medicine. This would be an atomic bomb delivered to the dynamic thriving American biomedical research industry. Projects would never be started. Scientists would have to leave the field. It’s wouldn’t quite be a “burning the Library of Alexandra” disaster, but the loss of research and personnel would be devastating. All so that RFK’s fellow “alternative medicine” liars, grifter and frauds could plunder the federal purse.
I understand a lot of people worry about Big Pharma and overprocessed foods, although as Gregg Eastebrook points out, if chemicals and overprocessed foods are killing us, they have a funny way of doing it. Almost all health indicators are positive, including declining cancer rates.
But even if that concern is legitimate: RFK, Jr. is not you man. He is not someone who is going to take on Big Pharma or Big Agriculture or Big Whoever. He is crank and a liar who is consumed with false claims about public health and will undermine some of our biggest achievements in the field. Just his anti-vax stance alone — using lies and distortions to attack the greatest health achievement in human history — should be disqualifying. But when you compound it with his attacks on research and his embrace of pseudo-science … this is a direct attack on public health.
The last thing we need is for disease like measles to come back and slaughter children. The last thing we need is a wave of suicide because people have been sent to a farm instead of being given anti-depressants. The last thing we need is for ground-breaking cutting edge scientific research to be replaced with aromatherapy.
There are going to be many times we need to man the rampart while Donald Trump is President. This is one.
[ThTH2] And while we’re on the subject of crackpots being nominated for government positions, Trump has also nominated Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and a darling of the Right Wing media, to head the NIH. Bhattacharya may not be as singularly destructive as RFK, Jr., but he is still a horrible choice.
It’s been a few years since I wrote about the GBD, which posited that our approach to COVID was wrong and we needed to open up society. You may recall that I was skeptical. Nothing in the four years has diminished my skepticism. If anything, it has strengthened my conviction that the GBD was badly misguided.3And no, the GBD authors were not censored for their views, no matter what they claim. And no, the experts were not as wrong as the COVID skeptics would like us to believe.
The GBD posited three things, all three of which have now been shown to be false.
- COVID was far less lethal to young people and therefore protecting them from the virus did more harm than good. One of the COVID myths we can’t seem to shake is the idea that COVID either kills you or does nothing. While it’s true that COVID was less lethal to young people (although a quarter of the dead were under 65), it’s not true it was harmless. Long COVID is an ongoing problem. We are currently experiencing a wave of pneumonia among young people that may be taking advantage of damage done by COVID. And as previously mentioned in this space, unvaccinated exposure to COVID is associated with cognitive decline, including among young people. It’s possible some of the decline in education performance we are seeing is related not to lockdowns but to COVID itself.
- Because of this, we should use “focused protection” to keep the most vulnerable safe while letting everyone else live their lives. There is no evidence that focused protection works. COVID can be infectious before people know they’re sick and so they can spread it inside “protected” spaces without knowing. You may recall, in the early stage of COVID, we had devastating outbreaks in nursing homes despite every precaution being used to protect the people in them. Sweden was often cited as an example of how to do this, but as I noted, Sweden eventually decided this approach was a failure and reversed course.
- This will be done until we reach herd immunity. Of all the contentions of the GBD, this was the worst. It is now almost five years since COVID broke out and have never gotten to herd immunity. We have gotten to a point of herd resistance, where prior exposure, either via infection or vaccination, has made COVID less deadly. But it is still killing tens of thousands a year.
In the end, the conventional approach worked best. We kept things reasonably constrained until the vaccines came out, then lifted the restrictions. We never achieved herd immunity but we did get to a point where most people are resistant. And we got there without the massive pile of bodies a “let ‘er rip” approach would have done.
The one question that was left hanging with the GBD was timing. The declaration came out right as the vaccines were finishing their trials. It was thought, at the time, that the vaccines might give permanent immunity and the end the virus right there.4Although I was always skeptical and hoped for a flu-like vaccine that would give seasonal immunity. Well, four years later, we see that the GBD authors, despite being wrong, are still being wined and dined by Republicans and the lead will soon ascend to the head of the most important health research organization in the world. And that is happening because the told and continue to tell a certain fraction of the public what they want to hear.
So maybe we have our answer.
[ThTh3] The attack on our public health institutions would be a problem for me in any environment. But I’m taking it personally now. As I recently disclosed on Twitter and Bluesky, my wife has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. She’s fighting it and we already doing chemotherapy. But this is one of those cancers that is very dangerous.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this down the road. It has completely turned over our lives. But a slender ray of hope is that cancer research has made leaps and bounds in the last decade with all kinds of novel therapies coming online. Thirty years ago, they would have given my wife some pain medications. Today, she is taking a four-drug cocktail that gives us a reason to hope, at least for more time if not a cure.
And we are entering this field just as a golden age of research is getting going. New breakthroughs are coming in both cancer treatment or detection.5One of the reasons pancreatic cancer is so dangerous is because it’s hard to detect early. Maybe they won’t arrive in time for us; but it could happen in time for a future family that has to face down this diagnosis.
Every moment people like RFK turn our research institutions away from science and toward nonsense is a delay in the arrival of those therapies. It means more suffering, more pain, more death. It means someone else going through this that doesn’t have to. I don’t care what he promises; anyone who wants to take the side of my wife’s cancer is, well, evil.
[ThTh4] So having dumped on two Trump nominees, I have some cautious praise for another. Trump has tapped Jared Isaacman to be the head of NASA. This seems like a solid choice with a chance to be a really good one. Isaacman has success in running big organizations. He bought his way onto private rockets but took those duties seriously, becoming the first private citizen to complete a spacewalk. Earlier this year, he wrote NASA asking them to restore funding to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, showing an interest in supporting NASA astrophysics.
He is skeptical of the extremely expensive SLS system but … most people should be. However, he has a sketch of a plan to replace it with a series of smaller rockets that will do the job at a fraction of the cost.6And, perhaps equally as important, keep the contractors happy.
You never know how an administrator will do until he’s actually siting behind the big chair. But this is one of the few incoming officials I’m positive about. He knows his stuff. He doesn’t hate the agency he’s heading. And he has some actual ideas about how to actually improve things, not a bunch of “bull in china shop” twitches. I look forward to seeing what he can do.
[ThTh5] OK, something a little more fun. Here’s a video about the F-14 Tomcat.
[ThTh6] No, dammit, AI is not going to replace doctors.
Some people really do think the human body is a big machine; you can fix it by taking the readings and looking things up in a big book. Garbage. The 8 years hones instincts that no computer can replicate. I wrote about this in the context of vaccines: https://t.co/urW48Sdzxx https://t.co/gABAT61jbq pic.twitter.com/MHo7qBYXfo
— Hal 10000 (@Hal_RTFLC) September 26, 2024
[ThTh7] This is a year old, but is even more true today. AI isn’t “hallucinating”, it’s bullshitting.
[ThTh8] No one will buy this, since it’s from a Chinese scientist. But it is consistent with what American and European scientists have also concluded: the COVID virus was only distantly related to the viruses being researched at the Wuhan lab.
[ThTh9] I love it when someone tracks down a “well-known fact” and discovers that it’s actually a well-known myth.
[ThTh10] Speaking of tracking down well-known myths, transgender women have not stolen 900 medals from biological women.
[ThTh11] Always be aware of sampling biases:
I like this better than the dot airplane pic.twitter.com/fD5j5HAOHO
— Whiskeypunk🧭 (@Whiskeypunk1) November 25, 2024
[ThTh12] We can actually now see the surface of another star
[ThTh13] The claims made in this article about Google’s quantum computer are a bit exaggerated: it’s doing a calculation that is optimized for quantum computers. But the progress in this field is real.
[ThTh14] Finally, Ad Astra to the WISE mission, which re-entered the atmosphere in November. After it ran out of coolant for its primary mission, it reinvented itself as a mission designed to, among other things, find asteroids that might hit the Earth. 14 years is a good run for a 10-month mission.
The RFK Jr. sanewashers tout a couple of things RFK, Jr. (fun fact, we sat in the same room to take the bar exam) is right about. The problem is, he’s right about the problems of Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture, big Republican constituencies he won’t be allowed to touch in a Trump administration.
It is very amusing that “taking someone’s whacko statements and ‘editing’ them to make them sound nicer in a press release” is now a bad thing because it’s being done for Republican-associated whacko statements.
That’s not what “sanewashing” means. But you knew that.
Seems to me like the best play would be to support him on the stuff that he’s right about and, at the same time, oppose him on the stuff that he’s wrong about.
Why support “him” rather than whatever he happens to be right about? He, himself, whether right or wrong on a particular issue, is an inconsequential whackjob who has no business being put up for the job he hopes to hold. Especially when he will not be allowed to pursue those things he is right about. Those who share his views on Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture have been advocating them despite the handicap of being associated with RFK Jr. and will probably continue to do so.
Let’s imagine that RFK Jr. gets replaced by someone “sane”.
It’s likely that a sane person will be much smarter about what he’s going to pursue. Unlikely to tilt against something that he has no chance of winning against.
No need for your support and your opposition would be meaningless.
I see that as less preferable than RFK Jr. saying “I’m going to go against (bad thing)” and me saying “Hell yes. Let’s oppose (bad thing)!” and supporting him.
And when he opposes (good thing), we can make dead bear jokes and call him stupid and crazy and a womanizer.
I think there’s a very real possibility that the worst medium/long-term effect of Trumpism will be a reduction in childhood vaccination rates large enough to threaten heard immunity for multiple diseases that for most of our lifetimes have been almost completely eradicated in the United States. A lot of people would then die or be permanently disabled.
I’m not sure anything he will be able to do about Big Pharma, Big Ag, or Big Food within the context of a Trump administration will outweigh that.
Sadly he’s already succeeded in mainstreaming ideas that were once relegated to a small number of marginal, crunchy weirdos, plus one former playmate of the year. It ain’t good.
Yeah, I can see that. Sadly, RFK Jr is a symptom, not a cause.
I remember seeing anti-vax stuff amongst the crunchy folks in the early 90s and gain traction here or there only to be pushed back by Science(tm).
And they got a little more traction and a little more traction and got pushed back and then the Thiomersal thing came out and we wandered from “it’s harmless” to “okay, we’ll remove it” and we were good for another couple of decades until we got to the mRNA shots.
There’s probably going to have to be some sort of public conversation about overselling and underdelivering on the part of the boosters of the mRNA shots.
Because, as it is, the FUD types have a lot of ammo and the boosters of the mRNA shots have forgotten how science works and seem to have pivoted to using the tactics that worked so well with Science(tm).
And, yeah, a lot of people are going to die or be disabled by stuff that a simple vaccine would have fixed.
Do you believe that’s disqualifying in an HHS Secretary nominee?
There’s a lot of crap that I see as disqualifying.
I’m still upset about politicians who ignored their own mask mandates, for example.
I was told that I shouldn’t care about such things.
As such, I see myself in the territory of that one quotation of Genghis Khan’s. Our sins were great. Thus we get to deal with RFK Jr as God’s punishment.
Why not just punish those politicians at the ballot box and leave the nation’s children out of the fight?
If you want to argue that the punishment exceeds the sin, I won’t argue with you.
I understand that God’s discernment is not ours, though.
I am arguing that the punishment (in this case the needless suffering and possible deaths of children from formerly vanquished diseases) won’t do anything about politicians you are angry with who didn’t follow their own mask mandates.
Unless of course you have joined the Steve Bannon “Burn it all down” camp. Which. Wow.
Wow? Do you consider it a “yikes”? Would you say “oof?” Perhaps it qualifies as “not a good look”?
And if Science(tm) does not convince the rubes, they will learn the hard way.
I do wish that science was treated better but… alas. That is the price of science having been settled, I guess.
Perhaps if you want science to be treated better, stop mocking it?
I am mocking Science(tm).
Not science.
I suppose I have some ribs for folks who conflate the two.
If we wanted “God’s discernment ” we would look to someone who has a credible claim to knowing what it is. But if the point is that none of us has such a claim, there’s nothing more to be said about it.
Well, if you didn’t like the part that mentioned the discernment of God, I’m glad I included another part of the comment.
(Wait, is this like when you complain about me only answering one of your questions instead of each of them?)
No, it’s not. You didn’t ask anything. I’m not sure you said anything either, but that’s another matter.
Not at all.
Though I certainly hope that, if there is a God, that He is open to giving modern medicine a helpful nudge in the right direction with the doctors trying to figure out the best way forward.
Yes. It’s disqualifying.
I’ve heard RFK talk. He’s convincing. Even if the person asking questions pushes back on him.
He’s got thousands of hours of practice defending his views.
You really have to know your stuff to understand that he’s talking nonsense and making arguments that have actively been disproven.
His talks sound like really good science but they’re just not.
“Fixed” isn’t the correct word. As far as we can tell, even with hindsight, it was perfectly fine and safe.
There was an argument for changing it to deal with unfounded fears, but afterwards the goal posts have been moved.
With hindsight it may have been a mistake to remove Thiomersal because it encouraged the anti-vax movement.
Why did you put “fixed” in quotes? While I did use the word, I didn’t use it with regards to Thiomersal.
Here’s the part where I used the word “fixed”:
My bad.
I read that the first time as “the vaccine had been fixed” (a common RFK talking point is they need fixing) and not “the vaccine would do the fixing”.
It’s likely that a sane person will be much smarter about what he’s going to pursue. Unlikely to tilt against something that he has no chance of winning against.
Why that is supposed to be less preferable? In your scenario, the new candidate won’t pursue a bunch of stupid s**t that RFK Jr. would and would make fewer ineffectual noises than RFK Jr. about stuff that is not stupid s**t but that neither of them would be allowed to pursue. And in either case, the support of people who would like those windmills tilted at — damn few of them Trump supporters — would be politically meaningless in a Trump administration. Your hypothetical, which you seem to think problematic, is, on the contrary, a net gain for sanity.
Why that is supposed to be less preferable?
It depends on how much you care about the status quo and how much you care about Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture.
If you don’t mind the status quo and don’t give a crap about Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture, it’s probably more preferable to have RFK Jr. replaced.
Neither RFK Jr., nor anyone else acceptable to a Trump administration, will do a damn thing about Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture, even if so inclined, because Donald Trump won’t let them. So that’s a wash. That just leaves us with how much you care about, oh, everything else. If you care about everything else, it’s much better not to have RFK Jr.
“well the dang gummint ain’t gonna let ’em do it anyway”
OK Boomer
Well, yes, the dang gummint won’t let the dang gummint do what the head of the dang gummint doesn’t want done.
Your point is?
Well, if RFK Jr. gets to the point where he tries to take on Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Agriculture, I’ll do what I can to support him instead of doing what I can to explain that it’s doomed and we should have had someone else.
Predicting is an actual thing, for which there can be varying degrees of justification. And people necessarily act on predictions all the time.
Do you actually dispute the prediction that RFK Jr. will not be allowed in a Trump administration to pursue the things some of us think he is right about?
If not, do you think that Colorado Springs Man supports RFK Jr.’s doomed attempt to defy his boss is sufficiently likely to matter to take on all the other baggage that RFK Jr. brings?
Or is this just rationalizing distaste for people who don’t like RFK Jr.?
I don’t know whether he’ll be allowed to pursue the things some of us think he’s right about.
I do know that he hasn’t been prevented from making loud noises about the things some of us think that he’s right about.
Which is a pre-req to him actually doing something about some of the things that some of us think that he’s right about.
Do you actually dispute the prediction that RFK Jr. will not be allowed in a Trump administration to pursue the things some of us think he is right about?
I don’t know if “the things” refers to “all” or “some”.
I’m pretty sure he won’t get everything that is on his wish list.
I hope that he gets some of the things that I think that he’s right about.
As such, I’m going to offer what little support I can in his pursuit of such things.
do you think that Colorado Springs Man supports RFK Jr.’s doomed attempt to defy his boss is sufficiently likely to matter to take on all the other baggage that RFK Jr. brings?
Compared to what? Compared to a sane candidate who knows better than to go after anything like that?
Slim is better than none.
And slim v. none on some good stuff outweighs all the bad stuff? Is there any other candidate for any other office to whom you would apply such a standard?
I thought it was “slim vs. none on the good stuff” vs. “the status quo”.
As such, it seems to me like the best play would be to support him on the stuff that he’s right about and, at the same time, oppose him on the stuff that he’s wrong about.
All this presumes that RFK Jr. would have to come back to the well of confirmation again and again on each policy he tries to enact which is, of course, nonsensical. There will be no “support him on the good stuff, oppose him on the bad stuff” option what so ever. If he pursued the slim chance of upside policies it’d be smothered within the administration/GOP coalition and the Dems support of that unlikely upside policy would mean nothing. When he persues the likely downside policies Dem opposition would, once again, mean very little. Dems get one attempt, up or down, to support or oppose JFK Jr.’s nomination. Since his nomination has a slim prospect of some good things and high likelihood of terrible things the only rationale choice for Dems is to oppose his nomination in total.
There will be no “support him on the good stuff, oppose him on the bad stuff” option what so ever
Sure there is!
If he tries to do something good, yell “HURRAY!” WE SHOULD DO THIS!!!”
And if he tries to do something bad, grab your phones and start posting dead bear memes.
I agree that if you think that he, in actuality, will do more harm than good, then I think that you’re right to oppose him.
Part of the problem is that there are a lot of nutterbutters out there (including Colorado’s own Jared Polis!) who think that he’s going to do good things.
As such… Eh. I could see supporting good things over the status quo.
And if he tries to do something bad? Well, deep state his sorry butt.
Well, you thought wrong. So answer the questions. Or don’t. Just make it clear that you aren’t going to and save our time.
“You thought wrong”
About what? I thought we were talking about stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.
“So answer the questions.”
I did! Oh, you wanted to know “Is there any other candidate for any other office to whom you would apply such a standard?”
I pretty much support all of the politicians out there doing good stuff and oppose them doing bad stuff.
That was clear enough. Thanks for playing.
What does “the things some of us think that he’s right about” mean?
RFK points to issues that science as “settled” as far as science settles anything and claims it’s a conspiracy that the results disprove his views.
He is to medicine what the flat earthers are to geology.
At best we’ll have a few billion dollars flushed “investigating” things we already know. At worst we will have scientifically disproven views on medicine introduced as “valid” and a large number of medical scientists will be fired because they’re not crackpots.
What does “the things some of us think that he’s right about” mean?
I’m using it to refer to stuff like some of the food dyes that are used in this country that are banned in, for example, Justin Trudeau’s Canada.
(They’re not for topical application either.)
The food dye is something I am ‘with him’ with also.
It honestly is astonishing how much we alter food to make it look a certain way. Just…change colors.
And yes, they change it like that because we associate that color with that food, but that’s literally their fault to start with. It’s an idiotic feedback loop where we just use these dyes because the food has to look the way they’ve been dying it for 50 years.
And, um…there’s something people need to know about food. A lot of dyes are…weird chemicals that would actually have problems passing any sort of safety test, they’re just sorta…grandfathered in. They’ve been used in food for decades, so you can use them in food. We don’t really know they don’t _do anything_.
However, two things: RFJ Jr. is not going to be allowed to add food regulations in an Republican administration. He simply is not. It doesn’t matter if he wants to do it.
And..saying he’s _right_ about food dyes is…wrong. See, he thinks all sorts of conspiracies about what they cause. I’m not even going to bother to look up what he’s said, a bunch of gibberish, but the reason we should not be using them is there is not, and has never been, a reason to use them in our food except to sorta…lie about the food quality. And plenty of them have been found to be actually dangerous.
I’m very sorry about the cancer that is hitting your family. I hope it goes well- cancer is never a joke.
“[Isaacman] has a sketch of a plan to replace it with a series of smaller rockets that will do the job at a fraction of the cost.”
ah-heh. A fraction of the cost per rocket, but two to three times the cost for the actual mission, which is what always happens when you try to do multi-launch missions with on-orbit rendezvous and docking included.
But it feels smaller because the rockets aren’t as big, and (as anyone who works in the restaurant industry can tell you) people who don’t know the details tend to assume that size = cost.
My complaints about the SLS are about the total failure from a systems perspective. Congress spent $20B developing a heavy launch vehicle that can’t actually meet Artemis objectives. It’s not big enough to send a capsule plus lander that meet the Artemis specs in a single launch. It can’t launch frequently enough to split the payload and do the job with two launches. The per-launch cost is non-competitive for anything except Artemis, and launches not committed to Artemis won’t be available before 2030 anyway.
Fun fact – NASA has been live streaming the rocket motor tests for Artemis from Stennis Space Center on both Youtube and Facebook. I have been onsite out there during several of them. EVERYTHING shakes when the motors engage.
This reminds me of a very popular conspiracy that somehow lingered until 2000 or so, that automakers had some sort of magical carburetor that would give really really good fuel efficiency, but wouldn’t use it.
The funny thing is, some of this conspiracy was true. Not the crazy ‘600 miles a gallon’ or even ’60 miles a gallon’, and it’s unlikely these designs were ever made, but there were theoretical carburetors designed by start of the 90s that could get better gas mileage, supposedly up to 20% better, altering fuel-air mixture in real time depending on conditions in ways that made simple butterfly carburetors look like kid’s toys.
The reason they were never used was two-fold: They were more fragile because they had a lot more moving parts (Anyone who has ever had a car with a carburetor knows they can get stuck.), using a lot more feedback and trying to alter the fuel-air mixture based on many more variables, and at that exact moment, we, uuh, invented computerized fuel injection and we just had a computer create exactly the fuel-air mixture we wanted at any give moment, based off whatever variables we wanted to use. Which worked way better than bouncing gasoline off a series of baffles in convoluted ways.
Considering the reporting this week that small SUVs are now the most fuel efficient ICE vehicles on the road, I’d say the unwillingness of automakers to do things is still a very open question.
I mean, it is very clear that automakers have the technology to make more fuel-efficiency vehicles, and the actual hurdle is cost.
Well, no, I lie.
See, what would actually happen is if they were forced to start selling those vehicles, and they cost what they would, people would just switch to smaller vehicles, which can be made fuel efficient much easier…which would completely bone American car makers who are utterly unable to make good smaller vehicles for some reason. (Japan and Europe would just breathe a sigh of relief and just start selling the cars here they already sell at home and discontinue the bigger stuff. Things actually would be _cheaper_ for them.)
Fundamentally, the problem is that the US keeps coasting along on cheap gas, forever. Because we are extremely stupid.
If I had a magic wand, I’d say ‘The cost of gas is magically fixed now, forever. It no longer varies by external factors and no one can change it. Instead, it goes up 10 cents per gallon every year plus inflation. This is irrevocable and will happen regardless of anything, and everyone knows it.’
People would start making saner calculations about the MPG of cars they buy, when they sit there thinking about how much gas is going to be in a decade, and the resale value.
Cheap gas is not good for the US. It’s good for the US _in the moment_, but it produces extreme shortsightedness. It is a ‘moral hazard’.
It also means outside actors (Who control gas prices) can massive influence American politics in somewhat stupid ways because the American people are, apparently, stupid in all sorts of ways, and think we can somehow get back to ‘cost of gas during a pandemic when people were driving 90% less’.
“If I had a magic wand, I’d say [the price of gas] goes up 10 cents per gallon every year plus inflation.”
sucks for everybody who can’t afford to buy a new car every year I guess
“Small SUVs” are cars, and cars get good mileage these days.