Cleaner Cars

This book chronicles a 35-year success story - the technology that was developed and the progress that was made to achieve the goal of reducing air pollution from automobiles. "Air pollution from automobiles as of the year 2000 will have been lowered to levels less than 5% of those for pre-control era vehicles," writes author J. Robert Mondt, who spent over 30 years working on the development of emission control systems for automobiles. Mondt covers both the technological and political aspects of this effort, from the early environmental concerns in California to the Clean Air Acts of the 1960s to the introduction of catalytic converters in 1975. He also covers the revised Clean Air Acts of the 1960s to the introduction of catalytic converters in 1975.

This publication analyses the effectiveness of fleet renewal and scrappage schemes in protecting the environment and reviews the schemes introduced to date in Europe and North America.

This report identifies policy options and makes recommendations on market-oriented actions to promote the purchase of the most environmentally friendly vehicles.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ebook: Urban Economics