Like most environmentalists who are at least vaguely concerned about the discharge of artificial carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, I breathed a sigh of relief – perhaps elation – to hear the president went ahead with enacting California’s climate change plans. Last week, the Obama administration wrote into the Federal Register a number of increases in federally required fuel efficiency standards, facing a looming Congressional deadline.
The action resolves a growing dispute between various states and the federal government, a conflict where the states – ecotopian Oregon and Washington included – wanted to enact higher emissions standards on their own, leaving the federal government to follow suit whenever it got around to it. Automakers hesitantly signed onto the plan, citing its inevitability and the terrifying specter of a federalized country with 50 different sets of environmental rules for tailpipe emissions.
Additionally, it’s fair to say Obama and Congress have Detroit automakers, the traditional opposition of environmentalists, firmly by the balls. Without current federal help, all three of the producers would possibly cease to exist, selling off what they can of their failing operations to creditors and probably the Japanese in bankruptcy court. Try as one might, it’s hard to argue against big-government regulation while simultaneously grasping at a big-government straw for dear life. And so, the new fuel efficiency rules were announced with Detroit’s meager blessing.
This isn’t to say the rules are without objection, however, as conservative commentators, more than willing to give voice to a silenced Detroit, quickly attacked the proposal to correct a rampant externality. The proposal adds, for the first time in federal regulation, a target reduction of tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions.
The first claim was that this would make cars more expensive, which it probably will in the short term. This is fairly easily dismissed on a number of grounds. First, and most importantly, any increased cost felt in your monthly car payments will likely be offset by the savings you get from burning less gasoline – a resource that, with the rest of the world industrializing and oil discoveries down to all but a trickle, will become increasingly scarce. Less important but still valid is the obvious factor that market innovation drives down costs fairly reliably, so even currently expensive technological improvements are unlikely to be costly in the future.
The next claim is that fuel-efficient cars are dangerous. At the very best, this assumption is inconclusive, given evidence from crash tests. At worst, it’s blatantly wrong: If everyone has lighter cars, everyone will be safer, and the market has been surprisingly effective at developing enhanced designs that both improve safety and cut emissions, and will continue to do so.
However, the best objections to this policy come not from the aforementioned blabbering of Rush Limbaugh wannabes, but from people in our own Pacific Northwestern backyard: the environmentalists.
One clear problem is that lower gasoline costs will increase mileage driven – not in the sense that the National Review might suggest, that daily commuters will suddenly be inspired to joyride – but in the sense that better fuel economy and lowered demand for gas might make the cost of driving less prohibitive. It doesn’t matter if you increase fuel standards by 1/3 if you double the number of cars used, as the externality of CO2 pollution will still increase.
The biggest problem with increasing fuel efficiency is that it attempts to forcibly regulate into existence an end that could be achieved much more easily by pulling subsidies for highways, traffic patrols, oil companies and whatever else pays the way for cars, and redirecting that spending toward truly efficient efforts such as mass transit and energy conservation. People could successfully assert a right to keep the government’s hands off their gas guzzlers. An auto business could even argue it should be free to make whatever kind of cars it wants without regulation. But even granting those arguments – which I’m not – it’s still hard to say they’re entitled to a fancy and well-maintained freeway, especially at the preference of far more efficient, higher-speed infrastructure for getting around.
All that being said, raising the fuel efficiency requirement is something long overdue, and I clearly applaud it. The big fix, though, remains elusive. It might, in the end, look a little more like the Portland TriMet and a little less like a Phoenix, Ariz., full of Priuses (Prii?).
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