I’m consistently impressed by Joe Romm’s extreme partisanship. I read Climate Progress because it’s often a valuable source of information on policy interventions designed to mitigate climate change. But I’m sorry to say that it often reads like propaganda for the Democratic Party. Brad Plumer is an excellent left-of-center journalist who advocates aggressive action against climate change. Naturally, I often disagree him. Yet he offered a characteristically smart and balanced take on cash-for-clunkers, one that comes out very mildly in favor of the program. His colleague at TNR Jesse Zwick followed up with a similarly cautious take.

The fact that this money is coming from a program meant to bolster renewable energy only exacerbates the concern that—from an environmental perspective—cash-for-clunkers has been marginally useful at best. At least some members of the Senate, however, appear hip to this fact: Diane Feinstein and Susan Collins released a statement insisting that any extension approved by the Senate must require newly purchased vehicles to achieve at least two miles per gallon greater fuel efficiency than is currently required under the program.

To be sure, Romm had new information: it turns out that, as Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has announced, consumers have been purchasing cars with significantly better gas mileage than their clunkers. But note the following:

A 9 mpg gain translates into annual savings of 3.8 million barrels of oil per year and nearly $1,000 for consumers at the pump -– not to mention that it will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 660,000 metric tons a year. Okay, not a cost-effective emission reducer, but still, given the multiple benefits of the program, pretty darn good.

Let’s reflect on that last sentence for a moment. Last month, I met a friend in London who left New Labour to work with the Conservative Party. After leaving university, he worked in the Treasury as a civil servant. While he was there, he was appalled by what he saw as the indifference of his fellow civil servants to the waste of taxpayer dollars. As a middle class kid from Yorkshire, he was keenly aware of the heavy tax burden that British families face, and though he had — and has — strongly egalitarian convictions that incline him to support generous social welfare programs, he couldn’t stand the thought that so much hard-earned money would be wasted with nary a thought. The fact that cash-for-clunkers happens not to be a cost-effective emission reducer strikes me as pretty important. If we lived in a world of massive budget surpluses, I might disagree. We don’t.

It should go without saying that Republicans have lost a lot of credibility on spending by not being as mindful as they should be with taxpayer dollars, which is why, on a tangential note, Republicans should be far friendlier to President Obama’s proposal for an Independent Medicare Advisory Commission. That doesn’t mean that opposition to cash-for-clunkers isn’t the right stance to take.

Back to the point at hand. Romm touts the economic impact of cash-for-clunkers before engaging in more tendentious conservative-bashing. Yet as Plumer noted, this is a double-edged sword in environmental terms.

And if the upgrades are, in fact, all meager, they could end up being dwarfed by the energy required to manufacture new vehicles (particularly since dealers have to scrap the “clunkers” that get traded in—many of which are perfectly good, albeit inefficient, cars).

Plumer’s view is not terribly political; after all, maximizing employment in the automotive sector clearly matters more to voters and members of Congress than reducing American energy consumption. Of course, Plumer is primarily interested in improving the quality of environmental policy.

P.S. In light of the new news on gas mileage, Plumer has a follow-up post.

Overall, the evidence suggests that the clunkers program could’ve been designed more intelligently, that Congress probably could’ve found better uses for that stimulus money (so there are big opportunity costs), but that, on balance, the program is at least doing slightly more good than harm. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but what were you expecting?

I continue to think we can do better. And in light of scarce resources, I’d rather zero out cash-for-clunkers than, say, a program that benefits the very poor or that is more cost-effective.