Let's Hear It for Choice: Diesel Is Here

Clean, efficient diesel cars are here now and there are more to come. This is good news for consumers looking for the hard benefit of fuel-efficiency and/or a few squishy utils of environmentalist self regard, giving them an alternative technology to hybrids. Hopefully, this technological competition will drive down the costs for both (which may even result in actual positive economics for Prius owners). Further, increased penetration of diesel into the passenger vehicle market will hopefully hasten the ramp up of refinery capacity to produce ULSD, which should ease fuel prices (see here and here). Finally, a subtle, but important, benefit of diesel uptake in the US will be to ground the debate over energy policy in reality, or at least move the debate in that direction. Diesel technology is real, it is available and it is going to have compelling economics. It will be harder for pie in the sky schemes (cellulosic ethanol) and bad technologies (hydrogen) to garner policy traction and secure economic rents in the face of our emerging diesel experience. Diesel may prove that we can take existing technologies and make them orders of magnitude better in terms of efficiency and environmental impact. If the nation's policy comes to broadly accept that we can have a huge impact by making existing technologies (read hydrocarbons) incrementally better, then we'll be alot better off.