See, in Liberal/Warmist World, everything is bad for citizens without the Helping Hand Of Government at the wheel, as we see Paul Bledsoe, who served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under (serial rapist) President Bill Clinton, bloviate in the opinion pages
Trump’s Fuel Efficiency Rollbacks Will Hurt Drivers
President Trump met with auto industry executives at the White House on Friday, arguing for his planned rollback of fuel efficiency and emissions standards, and telling them he wanted them to build “millions more cars†in the United States.
Let’s assume they would. If they did, any cars they made would also be dirtier and more expensive for consumers to drive without the fuel efficiency and emissions rules that the president wants to discard.
How much more expensive? A draft proposal by the Trump administration that emerged in recent weeks would result in additional fuel costs of “$193 billion to $236 billion cumulatively between now and 2035†depending on oil prices, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research firm that examines the market impact of energy and climate policy.
And those higher gasoline costs are likely to hurt most the very families President Trump claims to care so much about — the ones living paycheck to paycheck.
The fuel efficiency and tailpipe emission standards targeted by Mr. Trump were designed by the Obama administration and require automakers to meet escalating efficiency standards: 41.7 miles per gallon by 2020, and 54.5 m.p.g. in 2025. (Those numbers represent laboratory measures; on the road, they are equivalent to about 32 and 42 m.p.g., respectively.)
Let’s consider 4 of the most popular 2018 sedans
- Honda Civic 1.5 liter turbocharged: 35 combined MPG
- Honda Accord 1.5 turbo: 33 MPG
- Toyota Corolla: 1.8 liter 34 MPG
- Toyota Camry 2.5 liter 32 MPG
None are even close, right? But, the standards are about overall car lines, so having hybrids and full electric vehicles kick up the overall number. However, it still means that manufacturers have had to do different things to make each vehicle more and more fuel efficient, which has made them more dangerous, and more costly. At what point do the CAFE standards go beyond helping the consumer and making them either less safe and/or spend way more money?
Here’s the thing: does anyone think automakers will suddenly say “Oh, standards are rolled back, so we’re going to make everything super gas guzzly”? Well, Warmists like Bledsoe apparently do. What is more likely to happen is automakers will keep their current standards, and perhaps attempt to improve on them, while potentially coming out with a few vehicles that aren’t so fuel efficient, because Trump rolled them back to pre-Obama, he didn’t get rid of them altogether.
And having more choice is good for consumers. Think people who drive big V8s do not understand that they pay a lot for gas? Why are Warmists/Progressives against choice? If I want to drive a V8 Challenger, Camero, or Mustang, that should be my choice, not Government’s.
President Trump is pushing to reduce fuel efficiency requirements just as global oil prices rise from $50 a barrel to over $70 — in part because the oil markets are nervous about the president’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
These announced changes to the CAFE standards occurred well before withdrawal for the Iran deal. Leftists just making crap up now.
Given rising oil and gasoline prices, fuel efficiency would seem to be a worthy goal, both for consumers and the environment.
It is, but it should be up to the consumer and companies, not government.
CAFE standards were never about increasing fuel efficiency. They were about squeezing car companies for more taxes in the form of fines on the entire fleets that didn’t meet the standard. Thus driving up the cost of buying a car. Consumers paid it as the price of doing business.
Even having a hybrid in your offering lineup didn’t safe car companies from paying the fines because the tax was computed on total fleet sales. So if consumers didn’t buy the crappy little cars with great gas mileage, the entire fleet still had the fine added. Did any of those fines go to funding efficiency research? No. Just into the general fund.
The logic is: Socialist government will always look for profitable businesses to leach off of to fund their “programs”. When the CAFE standard was passed, auto manufacturing in the USA was very profitable. Further, the standards have been slowing getting tougher to meet because they were created back when everyone thought the world would run out of oil by 1990 and we would all be using portable fusion reactors. The fact is that physics is the limiting factor. It takes a certain amount of energy to push a vehicle of a certain weight down the highway at a certain acceleration. Gasoline has a fixed amount of energy it can release during combustion.
Ford Motor Company has decided to exit most of the sedan market, to concentrate on what its customers want: trucks and SUVs. The fuel efficiency standards are the government trying to enforce on the American people something that they do not want.
If Americans really wanted to drive Cooper Minis, they’d be buying them.
Me? I barely even fit into my wife’s car. My F-150 provides the head and leg room I need to be comfortable driving, and I’m not that tall, only 6’2.