Finally! Some Fuel Economy Common Sense

Paul Driessen Aug 07, 2018 @ Townhall.com

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies.

Of course, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.

Somehow, improved technology and geological acumen kept finding more oil. Then the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution postponed the demise of oil and natural gas production for at least another century or two. The fuels that brought wealth, health, longevity, and modern industrialization, transportation, communication and civilization to billions will continue doing so.

But the powerful forces arrayed against fossil fuels, internal combustion engines and automobiles have kept pushing for tighter CAFÉ rules. In 2012 – claiming that vehicle greenhouse gas emissions required a near-total shift to electric cars to prevent manmade climate cataclysms – the Obama Environmental Protection Agency decreed that they would reach 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025.

However, climate chaos is a product of computer models, a phony scientific “consensus” and hysterical headlines – not Real World evidence. (See here, here and here to launch some down-to-earth thinking.)

Electric cars represent barely 1.5% of new vehicles sold in the USA, a minuscule fraction of the total US vehicle fleet, and a vanishingly small, barely detectable portion of vehicles in use worldwide. Their short range, long recharging times and dauntingly high prices deter most drivers, despite taxpayer subsidies that can reach $10,000 per car sold to rich buyers. And their batteries have significant human health, human rights and environmental problems, as detailed here, here and elsewhere.

Moreover, the rest of the world is rapidly industrializing, building coal and gas-fired power plants to bring electricity to billions who still don’t enjoy its blessings, and putting more cars and trucks on their roads. So even if carbon dioxide has replaced the powerful natural forces that have driven climate and extreme weather fluctuations throughout Earth and human history, US mileage rules would make no difference.

It is therefore mighty refreshing to see that the EPA and Department of Transportation have proposed to freeze fuel economy standards at the existing 2020 target of 37 mpg. The proposal would also create a single national mileage and emission standards – and eliminate the arguably illegal Clean Air Act waiver that the Obama EPA gave California in 2013 to set its own (tougher) automobile emission standards.

To encourage discussion, negotiation and compromise, the EPA/DOT proposal also presents seven alternatives to the 37 mpg freeze: allowing standards to ratchet upward between 0.5% and 3.0% annually through 2026. Public comments will be accepted until the end of September.

Consumer groups and would-be new car buyers welcomed the move. Reactions from other quarters were predictably negative. Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown labeled it “an assault on the health” of all Americans – a “reckless scheme” that will force motorists to “pay more at the pump, get worse gas mileage and breathe dirtier air.” He promised his state will “fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.” Others claimed it would “roll back” efforts to “protect the climate.”

Major automotive manufacturers would prefer to have mpg standards climb steadily upward. They want to promote their “green” credentials, while selling more cars and light trucks … and avoiding vitriolic backlash from the likes of the Sierra Club and Gov. Brown. They like to see a negotiated deal.

As to “dirty air,” there is virtually no connection between mileage and vehicle emissions, which have already plummeted by nearly 98% from what came out of tailpipes in 1970. That’s why radical greens call carbon dioxide “carbon pollution” – to make it sound like soot, instead of the miracle molecule that we exhale, and plants use as a basic building block to make life on earth possible. The more CO2 in the air, the better and faster forest, grassland and crop plants grow, using less water in the process.

And where do greens think electric vehicles get their electricity? Wind turbines and solar panels? Fat chance. Try coal and gas-fired power plants – or nuclear and hydroelectric plants that they also detest.

Climate benefits are equally illusory. Even if there is a connection between CO2 and global warming (now given the always accurate nomme de guerre “climate change”), the EPA and DOT estimate that the difference between the Trump 37 mpg standard and Obama 54.5 mpg rule would be a completely undetectable 0.0003 degrees Celsius (0.0005 F) by 2100. That’s a microscopic 0.00004 degrees per year!

How can Gov. Moonbeam claim that freezing mpg will harm human health? By ignoring another reality.

As mileage standards tightened, car makers had to downsize vehicles, use less steel, and employ more aluminum and plastic. Even with expensive vehicle modifications like side air bags, these smaller vehicles have less “armor” to protect occupants, and less space between them and any car, truck, bus, tree or other obstacle they might collide with. So they are less safe, and less affordable for poor families.

Insurance industry and other studies show that bigger, heavier vehicles are safer. Drivers and passengers in 54.5 mpg vehicles are more likely to die in a crash – and far more likely to be maimed, disfigured, disabled or paralyzed – than if the fuel economy standards had been relaxed or frozen decades ago.

Freezing standards now at 37 mpg would save car and light truck buyers tens of billions of dollars over the next decade – and save families hundreds of billions in hospital, disability and related costs.

But tougher standards would save drivers billions in gasoline costs, Gov. Brown and his comrades claim. What chutzpah! These are the same folks who demand mandates for ethanol, which costs more and gets a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline. The same ones whose great champion once said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

That champion would be Paul Ehrlich, who remains deeply concerned about “population bombs” … and the human population levels that smaller, lighter, less safe cars are as good a way as any to reduce.

Then there’s the basic matter of “choice.” Not just for liberal women; consumer choice. Not everyone is an urbanite, with one kid, comfortable squatting down almost to pavement level to squeeze into an econobox “smart car,” happily hauling one or two non-plastic grocery bags a week from Whole Foods.

The rest of us – including those in the 85% of US counties who did not vote for Hillary Clinton – want affordable options, sizes and features that meet their individual needs. We’re tired of having urban and government intellectuals, pressure groups and ruling elites dictating our vehicle choice, steadily reducing our access to full-size sedans, mini or full-size SUVs, light trucks, panel trucks or whatever vehicles best meet our diverse family, boating, camping, farming, ranching, small business or other needs.

54.5 mpg definitely limits choice. And econoboxes are inherently unsafe slamming into an urban wall or tree at even 20 or 25 mph; at virtually any speed “mating” with an oncoming bus or truck; and almost anywhere on a rural highway, with traffic moving at 55-70 mph, and where many of us have seen these minuscule cars blown right over on their sides by high winds or passing semi-trucks.

A EQ Smart ForTwo, Fiat 500 or other “micro urban” car may be the perfect “adventure” for some, perhaps many. But not for me, and not for most of the folks I know and love.

From my perch, the best solution would be for EPA and DOT to roll these restrictive, dangerous, even deadly CAFÉ rules back a few notches. At least freeze them where they are – or, as a last-ditch compromise, restrict future hikes to 0.1% annually. If it matters to you, weigh in here by September 30.

Trump Slams the Brakes on Obama’s CAFE Mandate

August 5, 2018 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 

I don’t like the tribal nature of American politics, in part because I get criticized for not playing the game.

• The pro-Trump crowd goes after me when I condemn the President’s protectionism and wasteful spending.
• And the anti-Trump crowd goes after me when I applaud the President’s tax cut and regulatory reform.

I tell both groups that I care about public policy rather than personal or partisan loyalty. Not that this explanation makes either group happy.

Today, I’m going to give a “thumbs up” to the President for what he’s doing about car mileage regulations. Which means the first group will be happy and the second group will be irritated.
To be more specific, the Trump Administration is proposing to ease up on the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) rules. The Obama Administration, working with California environmentalists, proposed to make these regulations far more costly. Trump’s people basically want to freeze the car mileage mandate at the current 37-miles-per-gallon level.

Here’s a look at the history of the CAFE standards.

Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute explained earlier this year why these regulation impose high costs. And deadly costs.

The federal government’s auto fuel economy standards have for decades posed a simple problem: They kill people. Worse, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has covered this up. …To call it a coverup isn’t hyperbole. CAFE kills people by causing cars to be made smaller and lighter. While these downsized cars are more fuel-efficient, they are also less crashworthy. …A 1989 Harvard-Brookings study estimated the death toll at between 2,200 and 3,900 a year. Similarly, a 2002 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that CAFE had contributed to up to 2,600 fatalities in 1993. …The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which closely monitors crashworthiness, still provides the same advice it has been giving for years: “Bigger, heavier vehicles are safer.”

The Trump Administration apparently was listening to Sam, and has decided to block future increases in the CAFE mandate.

Environmentalists are predictably upset, but the Wall Street Journal opined on this topic a couple of days ago and explained why it is good news.

The Trump Administration’s deregulation is improving consumer choice and reducing costs… Its proposed revisions Thursday to fuel economy rules continue this trend to the benefit of car buyers… Obama bureaucrats were acutely blind—perhaps willfully so—to economic and technological trends in 2012 when they set a fleetwide average benchmark of 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025. …Americans prefer bigger cars, which makes it harder for automakers to meet the escalating Cafe targets. …As prices rise to meet the new standards, consumers would also wait longer to replace their cars. The average age of a car is approaching 12 years, up from about 8.5 in 1995. Newer cars are more efficient and safer, so longer vehicle turnover could result in more traffic fatalities… Thursday’s Trump Administration proposal to freeze—not roll back—fuel economy standards at the current 2020 target of 37 miles a gallon. …Automakers also want to duck a prolonged legal tussle with California, which received a waiver from the Obama Administration under the Clean Air Act in 2013 to establish its own emissions standards and electric-car mandate. The proposed Trump standards would apply nationally.

Holman Jenkins of the WSJ also weighed in on the issue, pointing out that undoing Obama’s expansion of CAFE mandates will have no impact on the earth’s climate.

…the effect on climate change would be zero. The Obama White House at the time exaggerated by a factor of two the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate of the effect on total emissions over the lifetime of the cars involved. It doesn’t matter. Two times nothing is still nothing. …Let’s remember the truth of Mr. Obama’s fuel-economy rules. He did not wander the balconies of the White House gazing far into the future when he drafted the 2021-25 fuel economy target of 54.5 miles a gallon. His flunkies, as documented in a House investigation, simply were looking for a impressive-sounding number to serve the administration’s political interests at the time. …in undoing Mr. Obama’s policies, Mr. Trump is doing nothing to hurt the climate.

Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute also wrote on the topic and noted that Trump’s policy will save about 1,000 lives each year.

…the administration has struck a blow for consumer choice that will be good news for drivers planning or hoping to buy a new car in the next decade. That’s because the mileage mandate is one of the main causes of rapidly rising vehicle prices. …Meeting ever more stringent fuel economy standards is driving up new vehicle prices. Sticker shock is thereby causing a lot of people to hang on to their current cars. The average age of all cars on the road is now at an all-time high of over 11-1/2 years. …Freezing CAFE standards will make new cars more affordable for millions of Americans and also allow many of them to buy bigger and hence even safer new models. How much safer will be hotly debated. The Transportation Department concludes that the proposed changes will prevent about 1,000 traffic fatalities a year. …For many people, fuel economy will still be the most important factor in choosing a new car. The good news for them is that the Trump administration’s action will in no way prevent them from buying a model that gets great gas mileage. The good news for everyone else is that the choice of models will be much wider than if the CAFE standard remained 54.5 mpg.

By the way, this isn’t simply a matter of saving lives.

After all, we theoretically could save thousands of lives by simply banning automobiles. In the world of sensible public policy, we make trade-offs, deciding if achieving a certain goal is worthwhile when looking at all the costs and all the benefits.

So it’s theoretically possible that a policy that leads to more premature deaths might be acceptable.
But CAFE fails even on that basis. As Marlo Lewis explained a few years ago, the policy both kills people and imposes net financial costs.

The bottom line is that Donald Trump just improved his grade on regulation.

Back in April, I gave him a B+ on regulation. But then he did something foolish in June that (if I recalculated) would have dropped him to a B. Now he’s probably back at a B+ because of the change to the CAFE rules.

Given what he’s doing on trade, he needs to boost his other grades as much as possible!

Editor's Note:  Libertarians can be frustrating, but their neither conservative nor liberal....they're libertarians, and I best define them as having the Everett Dirkson syndrome.  Economically conservative and socially liberal.  An impossible mix. Libertarian philosophy is like trying to ride two horses at the same time that are going in two different directions and yet expecting to get to some indefinable destination without falling off. 

 

Freeze, reduce or eliminate CAFÉ fuel standards

Too many small, lightweight cars cause too many deaths and injuries to justify tighter mpg rule

Paul Driessen

Saying the air traffic controller work force was “too white,” the Obama Federal Aviation Administration allegedly replaced hiring standards based on science, math and ability to handle intense pressure with rules designed to increase racial diversity. It’s hard to find a more flagrant example of bureaucrats putting people’s safety and lives so low on their list of priorities. Difficult but not impossible.

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards also play with people’s lives. Enacted in the 1970s amid fears of imminent oil depletion, the rules require that cars and light trucks on average across each manufacturer’s entire smorgasbord of vehicles must get better and better mileage over a period of years.

For the first few years, improving gasoline mileage was relatively easy. But as the standards tightened, car makers had to make vehicles smaller and use less steel and more aluminum and plastic to achieve the arbitrary mileage demands. That poses a serious problem that the Trump Administration wants to fix.

Bigger, heavier vehicles are safer, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has said for decades. Smaller, lighter vehicles are less crashworthy, less safe. Drivers and passengers in cars and light trucks are many times more likely to die in a crash – and far more likely to maimed, disfigured, disabled or paralyzed – beyond what would have occurred if the CAFÉ standards did not exist or had been relaxed.

Even with side air bags and other expensive vehicle modifications, smaller, lighter vehicles have less “armor” to protect occupants, and less space between them and any car, truck, bus, tree or other obstacle they might collide with. So they are less safe and more expensive – less affordable for poor families.

As Competitive Enterprise Institute general counsel Sam Kazman noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article, a 2002 National Academy of Sciences study estimated that CAFÉ rules had contributed to as many as 2,600 extra fatalities in 1993 – at a relatively lenient standard of 27.5 miles per gallon.

Studies by the Brookings Institution, Harvard School of Public Health, National Academy of Sciences and USA Today all reached similar conclusions.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) covered all this up. Grizzly facts would not be allowed to get in the way of a well-intentioned government program.

Thankfully, the mileage standards stayed around 27.5 mpg throughout the 1990s and beyond. But then, in 2012, the Obama Administration began ratcheting the standards upward, with the goal of hitting 54.5 mpg by 2025. The Environmental Protection Agency had begun helping to manage the NHTSA mileage program in 2009, and it became the driving force for doubling the mpg requirements. It became equally complicit in hiding the death and injury tolls associated with CAFÉ.

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking), other new technologies, and the discovery of new oil and gas deposits mean we will not run out of oil or natural gas for another century or more. So the Obama Administration asserted that mandating far tighter mileage rules would have the co-benefit of reducing tailpipe emissions of “greenhouse gases” associated with dangerous manmade climate change.

Scary headlines, data manipulation, computer models and well-orchestrated campaigns to link nearly every extreme weather event to rising atmospheric levels of (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide enabled the climate scare to get as far as it has. But the climate cataclysm movement is running out of gas.

People no longer accept claims that Earth’s climate was stable until the 1970s. They remember that it was a global cooling and global warming scare, before it became a climate change and extreme weather scare. They realize global temperatures have been stable for nearly 20 years, complying with Paris treaty and other climate edicts would cost trillions of dollars, and emerging economic powerhouses like China and India are not obligated or likely to reduce their use of fossil fuels or emission of greenhouse gases.

Despite $557 million in quiet funding by rich liberal foundations to wealthy alarmist groups, people are also figuring out that the Paris treaty actually has little or nothing to do with the climate or environment. “Climate change” is now used to justify replacing the capitalist economic model with a global governance system – and redistributing the world’s resources and wealth. The treaty itself says climate action must include an emphasis on “gender equality,” “empowerment of women,” “intergenerational equity” and “climate justice.” These are the “climate dangers” that supposedly justify lethal CAFÉ rules.

Thankfully, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recently proposed to re-examine the 54.5-mpg-by-2025 Obama EPA-NHTSA standards – and possibly freeze them at the pending 2020 level of 39 mpg. Mr. Pruitt noted that the standards had been implemented after years of lobbying by environmental pressure groups, and that assertions of climate and weather benefits do not reflect scientific or historical reality.

There has also been talk of revoking California’s unique right to set tougher standards than are applicable to the rest of the USA, and preventing the state from applying its more stringent mileage rules beyond its borders. EPA and Transportation Department officials say they have held “productive” discussions with California air quality regulators and others – but it’s hard to say where the talks might be headed.

The proposals drew predictable howls of outrage from environmentalists and California legislators and regulators, who are sticking to their claims that tougher mpg rules will somehow avoid climate chaos. An automobile manufacturers lobbying group insists that mileage standards should increase every year.

Auto makers would understandably prefer to have a single national mileage standard, rather than two: ultra tough rules for California and a less stringent mpg requirement for the rest of America. But the injury and death tolls dictate that any standard must be held well below 54.5 mpg or even 39 or 30 mpg.

Pruitt did not mention the injury and death tolls that result from these mileage standards. He should have, and his new plan to implement comprehensive cost-benefit reforms would compel his regulators to fairly, honestly and accurately assess the social and environmental costs and benefits of proposed mileage rules.

That would stand in stark contrast to the way EPA handled its arbitrary social cost of carbon analyses. The Obama agency looked only at alleged and exaggerated worldwide costs of United States carbon dioxide emissions – while totally ignoring the immense and benefits of using fossil fuels. To compound the insanity, EPA claimed it could make reliable predictions three centuries into the future!

To support its various pollution control measures, the Obama EPA raised its "value of a statistical life” presumably saved by a proposed regulation from $7.9 million in 2011 to $9.7 million in 2013. The VSL estimates how much money people are willing to spend to reduce a risk enough to save one life. There is no evidence that EPA employed VSL to estimate the human cost of doubling the 1993 27.5 mpg standard.

The agency should certainly do so now. Using a $10-million VSL, $2 million per serious injury or paralysis – and 4,000 deaths and 50,000 serious injuries per year from a 54.5 mpg standard – would mean the average fuel efficiency demanded by California and radical greens would cost the United States $50 billion a year. In return, we would get small, purely speculative climate and weather benefits from burning less gasoline in the USA, assuming that tailpipe emissions play a major role in climate change.

(Applying similar cost-benefit analyses to electric cars would raise serious questions about the generous state and federal tax rebates, free access to toll and HOV lanes, free charging stations and other subsidies for pricey vehicles that only wealthy families can afford.)

Volkswagen’s deceit about diesel emissions defrauded consumers but didn’t kill anyone. And yet VW has generated far more regulatory, judicial, legislative and media outrage than lethal mileage standards.

As Ralph Nader might say, CAFÉ standards make cars unsafe at any speed – not by faulty car design, but by government decree. It’s time to reduce, eliminate or at least freeze these killer standards (and do the same thing with the ethanol mandates and gravy train). 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow  (www.CFACT,org) and author of articles and books on energy, climate change, carbon dioxide and economic development.