What Californicators need to know about gasoline

I know there're a lot of people out there in fruit/nut land on the left coast on this board, so this is going to be my good deed for the evening. Believe it or not, people living in normal places actually look at those $4.50/gallon signs in the news and feel sorry for you guys. I'm going to explain the two basic problems which you need to address. The first of these two problems is not any sort of a big mystery; the second one might be.

The first part of the problem consists of having a rogue political party which for thirty years has prevented any new drilling, particularly offshore and particularly offshore of Flori-duh and California, as well as the construction of any new refining capacity in America. This is despite the proven realities that such drilling would not only be harmless, but that more oil offshore of California gets dumped into the ocean from seepage than would be by drilling.

The first part of the solution to your problem would be to outlaw and ban the demoKKKrat party.

The second problem is trickier. The second problem consists of ignorant beaurocrats trying to mandate increasingly strict standards on automobiles and fuels which is to the point of amounting to squeezing blood from turnips, when the fuels and cars of the last ten or twelve years are not a significant part of the problem. In fact the Japanese have told the EU that they basically cannot make gasoline engines run any cleaner than they are running now.

The air over DC and NY in 1974 was not much better than that over LA, but it's clean enough now that you don't hear much complaining over it. The big difference to my thinking is that you don't see people driving old cars in the mid Atlantic region.

I strongly suspect that air pollution in many places has become a 95 - 5 proposition in which 5% of the vehicles are causing 95% of the pollution and I know that a lot of people in California drive older cars, many considered "classics". That's not even counting all the built-up VW beetlebugs you read about in Dune Buggies and Hot VWs and what not.

Aside from lacking modern emission controls of any sort, most of those cars are going to have carburators instead of fuel injectors (as all modern cars do).

Aside from the likelihood of those things simply leaking gasoline, there's another problem which I'd guess most people under 50 never really understood.

In the age when carburators were the norm, there were a few cars such as the Alfa Romeo which had one carburator barrel per cylinder (two side-draft double-barrel Webbers in the case of the Alfa) so that fuel/air mixture to the four cylindars was at least equalized.

The norm however was to have one carburator mounted central to the engine on top of an intake manifold, and the air/fuel mixture going to the outer cylinders had to take a longer route and was always leaner (more air and less fuel) than the mix going to the inside cylinders. This meant that the vast bulk of all cars being sold prior to the mid 70s were set up so that the outside cylinders ran "right", and the inside cylinders ran a bit rich, i.e. with a bit more fuel than needed. This prevented burning valves on the outside cylinders.

You can also easily believe that this resulted in a lot of pollution. The difference between this and modern cars is striking. Friends in the wholesale auto trade who buy and sell cars at the big auctions at Fredericksburg Va. and Manhein Pa tell me that they have the occasional classic car auction and that it really hurts their eyes standing there around those old cars running. They were used to it in 1967 but they're no longer used to it.

My advice to Californicators: Drop the efforts to mandate fuel and auto standards beyond those of the rest of the nation, and do whatever it takes to get the old cars off the road.

Like I say, this is my good deed for the evening.