"3 decades later, air in most places is cleaner, and a lot more cars driving a lot more miles. It is a fact the pollution controls have helped.
Now was the auto industry and technology ready for the regulations? Bell no! My '73 Nova burned nearly twice as much gas as my '72 Super Cheyenne. But because of market forces and government regulations ICE cars run much cleaner, and burn much less fuel."
I agree that we are better off with current technology than what we had in the 1960's but there is an irony in this statement. By forcing control of selected emissions but ignoring others we ruined gas mileage for about 15 years and greatly accelerated global warming which now is the most intractable problem to deal with. To keep those gas guzzlers going we imported a lot of fuel and exchanged a lot of our wealth to those oil producing countries, damaging our economy and enriching many who have used it to harm us.
I would have greatly preferred doing like most other countries and first going straight to the source of the problem by taxing oil consumption in a meaningful way. Not a sudden slam but well planned and scheduled to phase in over 10-15 years so that everyone new what was coming and could plan for it. What we got instead were cars like my mother's 1978 Chrysler that dipped as low as 2mpg around town in cold weather. Sometimes forcing change too quickly just creates more problems.
