20 Comments

1. Gideon7:

Conservation alone will not reduce our dependency on Chavez and the mullahs, at least not without destroying the economy. The real long-term solution is reduce dependency by finding alternatives to foreign oil.

Obama is doing everything possible to block any real alternatives. He cancelled plans for oil leases for exploration off the Pacific coast. He also blocked the development of the Colorado oil shale fields, which potentially contain more oil than all of Saudia Arabia. He continues to block development of ANWR.

Obama’s budget cuts funds for the creation of the Yucca Mountain facility for disposal of nuclear waste, under construction for over 20 years. Cancelling it will effectively kill the most technolgically viable alternative to carbon fuels that exists today: nuclear power.

May 20, 2009 - 7:51 am 2. Roger L Simon:

Gideon7, I completely agree. Conservation is only part of the story. In every other way, Obama is deficient.

May 20, 2009 - 7:59 am 3. prsTM:

Er, Simon, higher CAFE standards will require lighter and therefore less safe cars. I haven’t got the numbers at my fingertips, but I believe CAFE has killed more Americans than terrorists have.

May 20, 2009 - 8:17 am 4. Webutante:

Roger, on this I must respectfully disagree with you. Squeezing even higher mpg standards will have some unpleasant effects on our people at a time of increasing economic turmoil. For instance—and I will be paraphrasing from a recent IBD editorial—

***The additional cost of a new unit of car will go up at least $1,300, and that’s just a minimum, making affordability go down for many consumers who will opt to keep old gas guzzlers and polluters on the roads longer.

***Downsizing cars will involve making them smaller and lighter. This will increase vulnerability in crashes and amount to more injuries and deaths in accidents. Perhaps these little cars can be justified around town, but I wouldn’t take your little Prius out on the interstate for long distances if you gave it to me.

***Finally, the R&D costs for developing these new light-weight domestics will be such a financial burden to the car makers that at least one manufacturere will go completely out of business sooner rather than later, costing jobs for many workers and dealers.

LA like Nashville has cleaned up its air act tremendously and that great. So please remember, one of your LA forest fires a summer puts more pollution in the air than any car emissions for decades. And that’s not going to change. This whole thing is folly IMO at this juncture in history.

May 20, 2009 - 8:29 am 5. Charles Williams:

The danger of forcing higher mileage standards is the sacrifice of safety. The trade-offs have been scientifically proven. Unless we want to pay an enormous safety premium for exotic metals and complex, and redundant, safety systems, automakers will simply cut the weight of cars. Do the math. Steve Milloy has.

According to Steve Milloy, the author of Green Hell, every 100 pound reduction in the weight of small cars causes traffic fatalities to rise as much as 715 per year. He claims that Obama`s proposed plan will kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War. He might be right: last month, for example, crash tests found that drivers of the 2009 versions of so-called Smart cars- basically sardine cans without the odor or the protection – could suffer serious injuries in front-end crashes with larger, mid-size vehicles.

See the whole article: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/ggutfeld/2009/05/19/daily-gut-deadly-dreams-in-tiny-cars/#more-138486

May 20, 2009 - 8:30 am 6. Tcobb:

but the psychological reality of this gesture is more important.

I don’t mean any disrespect to you Mr. Simon, but it seems to me that a lot of the troubles we are in are because the folks in power made policy decisions that were driven not by reality or experience, but by how such “gestures” would be perceived by others. Remember the 55 mph speed limit? It really didn’t save any gas, and they knew it wouldn’t. It was purely symbolic.

Lord save me from symbols and anyone who wants to tattoo them on my forehead.

May 20, 2009 - 8:55 am 7. David Thomson:

“The real long-term solution is reduce dependency by finding alternatives to foreign oil.”

That should never be your explicit goal! One merely needs to find ways to directly save consumers money on their energy costs—and everything else will fall into the line. And no, I am not being nit-picky. The goal of “finding alternatives to foreign oil” is simply too nebulous—and open to abuse. Also, the historical evidence clearly shows that virtually all improving technologies are both greener and lower dependence on all oil products.

May 20, 2009 - 9:11 am 8. plainslow:

Gideon7 is correct. If we developed ANWR from the day it was voted down, we would be getting 500,000 barrels a day from it. That’s 500,000 theSaudi’s and Hugo can’t profit from. Not to mention the money in American pockets, which would be taxed in production, taxed at the paychecks, and taxed when used.
And if we add the oil off the East coast (the oil the Cubans and Chinese who are much more enviromentalist then us, are going after), well then we would be talking about enough money, that the cabinet would’nt have to come up with the $100,000,000.00 savins.

May 20, 2009 - 9:50 am 9. Margie:

Drill Baby, Drill.

May 20, 2009 - 10:17 am 10. David Thomson:

Inventors are not being encouraged to create solutions to benefit the wallets of consumers. The wild eyed environmentalists, for all practical purposes, dictate political policy and the investments of the business community. This is why we see so many idiotic schemes such as corn fuels which have caused more harm than good—and are literally taking food out of the mouths of the impoverished. We must change focus. Entrepreneurs have to explicitly and consciously focus entirely on technologies that lower costs for consumers. Anything else only puts money into the pockets of scam artists and fascist inclined corporations like General Electric.

May 20, 2009 - 10:52 am 11. glenn wood:

I generally agree with your sentiments, I too am a former lefty now headed rightward but I must disagree, and here’s why.

Increased CAFE has in the past, and will in the future lend itself to more consumption of gasoline, not less. Two reasons: One, we will figure out a way to drive more miles when the cost per mile is driven down by mandate, thereby erasing all or most of the benefit due to increased MPG. Inner city flight was accelerated by the first round of CAFE begun in the 70’s, and the same will happen again. Result? More commuting and more miles driven. In which alternative universe can the conservation of a commodity be increased by making it cheaper to use? Just watch as people choose to use their vehicles more, for everything conceivable, from using the automobile for more vacations, to choosing a home further from work, because the automobile will be cheaper to use.

Secondly, increased CAFE KILLS mass transit. If you owned AMTRAK, and didn’t have the government to subsidize you, you would be livid about the government enhancing the ability of your nearest competitor to reduce demand for your services. The battle for ridership between mass transit and individual mobility is zero-sum. Private bus companies abhor CAFE, any type of public transportation loses out to the automobile when the automobile becomes cheaper to operate.

So we can have CAFE, or we can have mass transit, but we can’t have both simultaneously. AMTRAK will need more subsidies. Unintended consequences once again rule with liberal government interventions into the marketplace.

We will in the end be using more gasoline by virtue of this latest round of CAFE, over time, just like the last time conservation through MPG mandates was tried.

May 20, 2009 - 11:10 am 12. Larry J:

***Finally, the R&D costs for developing these new light-weight domestics will be such a financial burden to the car makers that at least one manufacturere will go completely out of business sooner rather than later, costing jobs for many workers and dealers.

No, this will require increased subsidizies in the form of “loans” from the taxpayers to the auto companies. This cost to taxpayers will be over and above the quoted (and likely inaccurate) estimate of $1300 per vehicle in increased cost to comply with Obama’s dictates.

May 20, 2009 - 12:09 pm 13. Webutante:

Larry J, you are correct. I stand corrected.

May 20, 2009 - 12:25 pm 14. Susan:

What Margie said.

May 20, 2009 - 12:32 pm 15. Seppo:

Mr Obama is also President of the Good Intentions Paving Company, Inc.

Too bad he chose one of the very worst means to attempt to achieve the ends he is seeking.

Only price signals will cause buyers to move to smaller vehicles. All we get with this initiative is greater state power and a freshly paved road…

May 20, 2009 - 12:33 pm 16. Lightnin' Hopkins:

Frankly, Obama is coming to resemble Chavez more than he appears to oppose him. I certainly hope the oil companies aren’t next in line to be “saved.”

I agree with Margie #9, but fat chance. The miraculous natural substance which hastened the development of the modern world we are privileged to enjoy today has been thoroughly and successfully demonized.

May 20, 2009 - 1:39 pm 17. California Dreamer:

@12 Larry J is right on the money–sad little pun intended. We are headed for a death spiral of never-ending taxpayer funding for failing car manufacturers because their unions are “too big to fail” exacerbated by innovative car designers declining to work for a manufacturer that is 55% owned by a group that couldn’t redesign a headlight if their life depended on it. It’s the same problem Lightnin’ refers to as we watch the Venezuelan oil infrastructure decay.

May 20, 2009 - 7:18 pm 18. Wellspring:

By killing hydrogen fuel cell research, and with blows to the hopes of switching to nuclear power, Obama is essentially killing any long-term solution to the fossil fuel dependency problem. Certainly, consumer costs will go UP and quality will go DOWN, but he’s actively interfered with the Cheney plan, which aimed to escape the fossil fuel equation altogether.

Meanwhile, his tinkering with the rule of law in the contracts system is making long-term, capital-intensive projects like the Pickens plan unfeasible.

Ironically, the election of President Obama is the best long-term news the oil sheiks could have hoped for.

May 21, 2009 - 6:19 am 19. Roderick Reilly:

Uh . . . . Roger, L.A. skies have been cleaner for quite some time now thanks to previous, perfectly reasonable CAFE standards. Obama’s new edict is not reasonable.

May 21, 2009 - 2:58 pm 20. cubanbob:

The fundamental flaw in Roger’s argument is the conflating the need for oil with the need for Arabs. If we were to fight a war for oil (as in oil for us) and only for the oil, Arabs are entirely dispensable. If that point were to be sufficiently, forcibly made, then this whole Jihadi Islmofascist situation could quickly eliminated.

In the meantime if the Obama would simply get out of the way and let oil companies explore for oil here, a lot of our dependence on Islamic oil would be lessen. The average car on the road today if less than 5 years old, if properly maintained can last well over ten years. When the public is offered expensive, uncomfortable death traps to placate the environmental zealots, a great many people will simply keep the cars they already have and ride out this democratic- green-communist storm. 10 years from now they will out of power and a very bad memory.

May 23, 2009 - 9:48 am

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