Originally Posted by Eric5273

Yes, I do. On a large scale, people only do things such as this when they are forced to. It will not happen volunterily.

Yes, some people will buy hybrid/electric cars, and some people will spend the money to fit their homes with solar energy, etc. But they will be the minority. Real change will only happen when the majority submits to these sort of changes, and that will only happen when it is law.

As you may or may not know, a car today produces about 1-2% of the carbon emissions of a car produced in 1960. Yet, never during that entire 50 year period have the auto manufacturers reduced carbon emissions on their own. Instead, as regulations changed (i.e. laws), they had to make changes to their cars in order for their cars to pass emissions tests, and so they did. Do you really believe that would have happened on its own if the government still had the same regulations they had in 1960?

Another example of this is safety. Today there are so many safety regulations, that many cars produced in other countries have to be modified in order to be sold in the US and meet our strict safety standards. Without these laws, many cars being sold would be unsafe. While you may occasionally read complaints from car enthusiast magazines about how we cannot get certain vehicles because they won't pass US safety standards, Americans as a whole are better off because we have these safety standards, and tens of thousands of Americans owe their lives to the fact that we have such laws. If you have ever been in a serious car accident, you could even be one of them.