Is CAFE Needed? Consider Prodding the Public Rather Than Pushing Automakers
As federal regulators, automakers, enviros and state air quality officials get set to sit down together to work up a national plan for reducing greenhouse gases by improving fuel-efficiency, there's going to be a lot of talk about the federal CAFE -- corporate average fuel economy -- standard and the mileage vehicles will have to get to meet the goals.
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We'll pay for fuel economy one way or another. Let's pick the best way.
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We've lived with CAFE for decades now and while we agree that it has helped push automakers into improving vehicle fuel economy, it also is easy to see that it hasn't helped enough.
That's because some automakers find it cheaper to pay the annual fines for not achieving their CAFE numbers than to spend the money it would take to do it. Others insist that building cars to meet CAFE would ruin what they stand for -- high performance, heavyweight luxury and the like -- and destroy their ability to market their vehicles here.
The plan that the feds and the automakers will now start kicking around seems to be based on California's controversial effort to achieve a 30 percent reduction in automotive greenhouse gas emissions, and it often is rendered in journalistic shorthand to say that it will require passenger cars to hit an average of 42 miles per gallon and trucks to achieve 26.2 miles per gallon by 2016.
Fuel Choices Matter
The reason greenhouse gases get turned into miles per gallon is that our vehicles mostly burn carbon-based fuels and the major greenhouse gases are the carbon emissions that result, so a vehicle's GHG output is directly related to its mpg average.
That's if we don't change our fuels.
Shifting from gasoline to biodiesel and cellulosic ethanol could dramatically lower the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted per mile because they have far less carbon content than petroleum-based fuels.
Using electricity or hydrogen would eliminate tailpipe GHG entirely, although production of the electricity or extraction of the hydrogen (which doesn't exist in nature except bound to other elements) would create emissions elsewhere that would have to be dealt with.
Providing a variety of vehicles that would give us a transportation fleet using a healthy mix of fossil, low-carbon and no-carbon fuels would mean that overall fleet fuel economy wouldn't have to be as high as that 42 mpg figure that frightens so many, or, more precisely, the higher fuel economy of electric and hydrogen vehicles and the lower carbon of bio-fueled vehicles would help offset the high carbon emissions of petroleum-fueled vehicles and make it a lot easier to hit whatever overall carbon emissions/miles per gallon figure is finally called for.
Thus Americans could still have their 12 MPG large pickups and SUVs, offset by 100-plus mpg-equivalent battery-electric or hydrogen fuel-cell cars, 80 mpg extended-range and plug-in hybrids, 60 mpg conventional hybrids and low-carbon vehicles like Edmunds' own 32 mpg natural gas-powered Honda Civic GX which emits about 30 percent less CO2 than the gasoline-fueled model.
Is CAFE the Wrong Way?
And if the planners and regulators who are charged with developing this nifty national auto plan actually put on their thinking caps (instead of their political expediency helmets) they might also see that CAFE, which simply tells automakers to hit a goal regardless of whether people would want the resulting vehicles, could be done away with under a policy that uses financial incentives (and disincentives) to prod us in the direction that we, in our collective wisdom, want to go.
For while fuel economy has gone up since CAFE was first enacted in the 1970s, so has total gasoline use and the average number of miles traveled each year.
Making cars more fuel-efficient, it would seem, simply encourages us to drive more and waters down the impact of escalating gas prices.
The gasoline tax might be a better tool than CAFE if the goal is to curtail gas use.
A $1 per gallon increase would encourage us to think about walking to the corner store instead of driving; to carpool or use public transit. If it didn't lower our consumption, it at least would raise a ton of money -- $150 billion a year based on our 2006 consumption of 150 billion gallons of gas. We could use that to help capture and sequester CO2.
Because consumption taxes typically fall heaviest on the low-income people who can least afford them, some of the funds raised from any fuel tax hike ought to be earmarked to help the working poor pay for the fuel, or the mass transit, that they would need to get to and from their jobs. The rest could go to spur development of alternative fuels.
Shoulder Responsibility
We might also start taking personal responsibility for the impact our transportation preferences have on the environment and the infrastructure. After all, automakers may churn out gas-guzzlers, but we're the ones who buy them and thus keep encouraging more production.
A tax or fee based on a vehicle's tailpipe emissions and weight, which equates to wear and tear on road surfaces, would be a fair way of ensuring that we paid for the consequences of our choices.
Mrs. Smith ought to pay more for the privilege of tearing up the roads and fouling the air in her 6,000-pound SUV than Mr. Jones pays to help offset the impact of his 3,200-pound compact.
Politicians, of course, hate taxes that will directly affect the voters they're trying to woo, and most people don't enjoy paying taxes. That's why CAFE has become so popular.
Raising the national fuel-economy standard makes it look as if Washington is pressing the auto industry when, in fact, CAFE really is an indirect tax that consumers don't recognize and politicians don't have to admit to. If complying with CAFE increases automakers' costs, you can be sure that at least some of the hike will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher car prices.
Let's begin a dialogue even as the politicians, regulators and industry executives gather to do their own national auto policy planning.
Can CAFE alone do the job? Or do we need fuel taxes and use fees to curb our national appetite for oil and spur development of vehicles that don't use those greenhouse-gas producing, petroleum-based fuels?
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
- Posted by
- John O'Dell May 18, 2009, 10:14 PM
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- Categories:
- Emissions, Fuel Economy, Legislation, Opinion
- Technorati Tags:
- CAFE, Emissions, Fuel Economy, Greenhouse Gases, National Auto Policy
CAFE has never worked, and in my opinion, probably never will work. It's like treating the symptoms but not the cause.
All of the world's automakers could suddenly dump all of their current cars and only make small hybrid sedans. You know what would happen? People would just keep their current cars running endlessly.
You can't force anything on the consumers. Just ask the RIAA & MPAA. The consumers will decide what is right and what they want to buy. And trying to convince 300 million Americans that they need to drive more fuel efficient cars is an uphill battle to say the least.
I agree with John's position in the article. This is stupid. They are punishing the automakers because no one has the guts to question the almighty American lifestyle. It makes absolutely no sense for a large percentage of people to be driving 30+ miles to and from work. The majority of these commuters have no other passengers in the vehicle so this is just a wasteful habit that spews needless emissions because we are stuck in our inefficient ways. People need to stop moving out to the middle of nowhere just to spend 2 hours driving to their job- that's more of an issue than any of this nonsense. If I had the money, I'd buy a V8 powered gas guzzler because I catch public transit to work so I would still use much less over my vehicle's life over the person in a Civic who puts 80 miles on their car every day just to commute. The media targets Escalades and F-150s for getting super low MPG but never questions the people who buy them. The government couldn't wait for the economy to tank so they could impute this foolish idea. How about the go after the commerical trucking industry who have had comparitively lax emissions regulations over the past couple of decades compared to passenger cars? How about the promote more transit lines adjacent to brutally clogged highways?
PS: Obama- you pay interest on purchased vehicle so they more it costs upfront the more you pay the bank over the length of the term. Trying to offset that fact with the promise of a few dollars savings at the pump just doesn't hold water.