Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=327625607353796
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, May 19, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Regulation: The administration announced Tuesday that it wants to increase car mileage standards. That will cause an inevitable increase in carnage on our highways, and could kill a car company or two.
Read More: Business & Regulation
Washington began imposing fuel mileage standards on cars sold in this country in the 1970s, and the urge to regulate has not abated.
Congress last reset the corporate-average fuel economy standard in 2007, passing a bill — signed by President Bush — requiring automakers to increase their fleetwide average, including minivans, SUVs and pickup trucks, to 35 mpg by 2020.
That's not good enough for the White House. It announced Tuesday that it will seek regulatory authority to impose a new standard of 35.5 mpg by 2016 and, for the first time, limits (a 30% reduction) on car greenhouse gas emissions.
The cost of this luxury will be steep:
• An additional $1,300 per car. This makes a new car unaffordable for a large segment of the population. Many will have no choice but to keep their current poor-mileage, heavy-polluting cars on the road, defeating the purpose of the program.
• Human lives. The administration is denying that the industry will have to downsize cars to meet the higher standards, but there's no way around it. Cars will have to be smaller and lighter, making them more vulnerable in crashes.
In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences reported that "the downweighting and downsizing that occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of which was due to CAFE standards, probably resulted in an additional 1,300 to 2,600 traffic fatalities in 1993."
The CAFE standard in 1978 was 18 mpg, roughly half of what the White House wants to require beginning with the 2016 models. How much deadlier will the new cars be? Sadly, we'll soon see.
• The existence of at least one U.S. carmaker. Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told us the research-and-development costs for building a fleet that can meet the mileage and emissions requirements will be such a burden that one of the three domestic automakers, which are in failing financial health, might not survive.
Supporters of the harsher standards like to point out that the industry would rather have a single federal standard for greenhouse gas emissions than a patchwork of state standards. (California has tried to establish its own greenhouse gas limits.) That might be so. But as Kazman says, all carmakers are doing is asking for one noose around their necks rather than several.
With this initiative, Washington is yet again trying to force a solution for problems that don't exist — or wouldn't if government would get out of the way.
What's the value of saving 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the program, as the administration claims the standards will? By simply opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to the drill, we would have more far more than that in the pipeline. A U.S. Geological Survey estimate indicates that ANWR could hold as much as 17 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
And what are the benefits of removing 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air? This is a useless exercise. Carbon is a naturally occurring element and a weak greenhouse gas.
Man contributes less than 4% of the total volume of CO2, which itself makes up just 0.038% of the atmosphere. It's a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
Americans don't need their government dictating what kind of vehicles they'll drive. Yet Washington is busy taking over automakers and imposing its will on car design. Eventually, every car made in Detroit will have only Reverse and no Drive in its transmission to reflect government's forced direction on the industry.
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