That old truck is probably polluting 10-30× more than a modern one. While corporations have their flaws, they have spent time and money making engines more efficient and reducing harmful emissions.
In France, we have mandatory car checkup every few years where they test the pollution from the back of the car.
My old car, made in early 90 barely emitted more pollutant than regulation allow.
Ended up buying a Volkswagen Passat, very impressive it emitted a lot less. Then dieselgate happened... Now it's barely under what the regulation allow.
Keep your old polluting car, in the grand scheme of things it is better than buying a new one that end up polluting much more to build than what you would gain in everyday emission.
your theory assumes that everyone is lying about their emissions and then later assumes that your old car is not, in fact, lying about emissions. also that you can just keep an old car running indefinitely on a limited budget.
there wasn't much pressure from regulation to have low pollution emissions in car during the early 1990, beside the car i'm speaking about, a golf 2, has such a small diesel engine that it makes sense it would pollute very little compared to the much heavier and much more powerful passat (at least compared to the whooping 50 horse power the golf had !).
i can still remember avoiding road too steep lol.
Beside, when i am saying that keeping the older car is better for environment, i am not theorizing but speaking about things that have been studied.
> Specifically, researchers find keeping older fuel efficient cars on the road longer reduces CO2 emissions significantly more than speeding up the global transition to green technology.
I wish more people were aware of this. I'm often reminded of a conversation I overheard at my high school retail job:
$OLDGUY_CUSTOMER (to my coworker): "Wow, I just saw a big crash on [nearby arterial road]! The entire front of the car was smashed in!"
$COWORKER: "Oh no! Was the driver alright?"
$OLDGUY: "Yeah, he seemed fine. There wasn't an ambulance or anything." [beat] "Man, they don't make them like they used to. When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that - it was much safer!"
That old truck will pollute less in its lifetime than the amount of energy it takes to produce a modern automobile, let alone the cumulative energy spent to sustain a consumer base ready to sign a new lease every 36 months for the latest and greatest in aggregated conflict minerals + spyware on wheels, it just does it all over the poors someplace else instead of where you live.
