SALON

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 6:25 PM UTC

Are the new fuel standards worth the cost?

Opponents of President Obama's new fuel economy rules say his plan will cost Americans money, and might kill thousands.

By

Topics: War Room,

Are the new fuel standards worth the cost?

Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

U.S. President Barack Obama shakes hands with Ford CEO Alan Mulally after announcing new federal CAFE standards on May 19, 2009.

In an event at the White House Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon in which he was flanked by executives from Ford, Toyota, GM, BMW and other major car makers, President Obama officially announced new CAFE standards — rules for fuel economy for automobiles on American roads.

“In the next five years, we’re seeking to raise fuel-economy standards to an industry average of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016, an increase of more than eight miles per gallon per vehicle,” Obama said. “As a result, we will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years. Just to give you a sense of magnitude, that’s more oil than we imported last year from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Libya, and Nigeria combined. Here’s another way of looking at it: This is the projected equivalent of taking 58 million cars off the road for an entire year.”

The auto industry has signed on to the proposal — they don’t like the idea generally, but the imposition of a single national rule makes things much more predictable, and more cost-effective, for them than a patchwork system of regulation in which states set their own standards. But not everyone is so enthusiastic.

Conservatives are hitting the plan over the cost it will impose on consumers: The administration acknowledges that by the time the proposal is fully implemented, it will have led to a $1,300 increase in the average cost of a new vehicle. ($700 of that, the administration says, is due to standards that were already in place.)

“Nobody in the White House is going to call the president’s ‘mileage and pollution’ plan what it is,” blogger Michelle Malkin wrote. “It’s a $1,300 car tax. On the working class. On the middle class.” Quoting a senior administration official who, in a briefing for reporters Monday night, said that consumers would recoup that money at the pump, Malkin said, “Let’s all deliver a collective snort in response to yet another self-delusional bureaucrat’s promise that yet another massive government intervention will produce cost savings… All together now: SNORT.”

Malkin and others, like Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. and the National Review’s Iain Murray, also discussed a potential human cost to the new standards. 

“Government mandates on automakers raises (sic) the cost of owning and maintaining a car for American families and hurts our economy,” DeMint said in a statement, continuing:

Second, smaller cars are more dangerous in high speed crashes and lead to more deaths on the road. And finally, many experts believe higher CAFE standards will not reduce vehicle emissions because it (sic) leads to increased driving and reliance on alternative fuels that produce new types of harmful pollutants.

All of this is being driven by politics and fear, not economics and certainly not science. The President’s plan will make cars more expense (sic) and less safe while doing little to nothing to help the environment.

In a post at the Corner, a National Review group blog, Murray wrote, “[D]ownsizing of the American fleet has contributed to around 2,000 extra deaths on the road at current CAFE levels, because smaller cars are generally less crashworthy. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed this finding a few years back. Certainly, cars are becoming safer, but they would be safer still if they were allowed to be bigger and consumers given the choice between safety and fuel efficiency.,. [T]he new policy will lead to around 800 more needless deaths on the road each year. Blood for less oil, you could say.”

That is true. In 2002, the NAS found that in 1993, CAFE standards had led to the death of somewhere between an additional 1,300 to 2,600 Americans in auto accidents. Obviously, no one wants that to happen, but the number does deserve some perspective: First, it’s a relatively small portion of the total number of fatalities. Assuming Murray’s calculation that the new policy will mean about 800 new deaths is correct, that’s only a 2 percent increase over the 2008 total of 37,313. And there’s an argument to be made that savings in fuel mean lives saved overall, because of the environmental effects and the policy implications of a decrease in U.S. dependence on oil from the Middle East.

The people citing the NAS’ findings on deaths aren’t noting some other data from the relevant study, however. Despite Malkin’s “SNORT,” the NAS’ calculations seem to indicate that these standards actually would lead to an overall savings for consumers over the life of their vehicle. And those numbers are from a time when the NAS was assuming that the price of gas would be $1.50 per gallon. Now, the government’s estimating that gas will cost $3.50 per gallon by 2016, when the proposal is fully implemented.

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon. More Alex Koppelman.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 68 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

War Room is our political news and commentary blog, with coverage and commentary throughout the day.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Journalists file suit against Manning's trial secrecy: Plaintiffs including Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange demand press, public access to trial and documents
155 points156 points | comment
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
139 points140 points | 95 comments
vote
Report: Nearly a quarter of Americans struggle to afford food
138 points139 points | 12 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
127 points128 points | 44 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
78 points79 points | 19 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations