Hip, hip, CAFE!

The most worrisome aspect of the bill is that it won't force automakers to meet its relatively modest goals. If the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration can show that it's not "cost effective" for automakers to meet the 35 mpg goal, then it won't have to require them to do so. "It's a big loophole," says Shull of Public Citizen. "Industry has perfected how to push through that loophole. It's going to be very easy for them to do much, much less than what the Senate thinks it has demanded. It's not a mandatory increase to 35 miles per gallon."

If there's a loophole that favors the automakers, you can expect the NHTSA, which is in charge of administrating CAFE, to find it. "They are a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Detroit automakers," says Becker. "Since 1989, they have sat on their tailpipes and done virtually nothing to improve fuel economy standards. Their approach to regulating the industry is to ask the industry what they want, and then do it."

There's also no guarantee the CAFE standard forces automakers to improve the gas mileage of their fleets. Some manufacturers regularly pay hefty fines for crossing over the CAFE border. For years, luxury automakers, such as BMW and Porsche, have simply eaten the fee as the cost of doing business in the U.S.

While the CAFE debate moves to the House, probably this fall, another approach has surfaced to get drivers to choose cleaner cars, trucks, SUVs and minivans. Still want to buy a gas guzzler? Fine, go ahead, but you'll have to pay a surcharge. The state would then use that money to fund rebates on more fuel-efficient cars.

In June, the California state Assembly voted down such an ambitious "feebate" bill, called the Clean Car Discount Act.b

"It creates a carrot and a stick," says California state Assembly member Ira Ruskin, who authored the legislation. "It creates the carrot that gives an incentive for consumers to purchase cleaner cars, and it provides an incentive not to purchase the dirtier cars."

With 1.8 million new passenger cars and trucks rolling out onto California's roads every year, Luskin's bill is part of the state's effort to reduce greenhouse gases at the tailpipe to comply with California's ambitious plan to curb global warming pollution. In the state, transportation accounts for 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

"People who are buying Hummers and muscle cars don't care about the environment," says Rosemary Shahan, president of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, who supports the legislation. "They can still do that, but somebody else would be buying a much more fuel-efficient minivan thanks to them. Suddenly, lower and more moderate-income drivers would have access to that technology."

Theoretically, the program would create an incentive to automakers to produce more of the cleaner models. California, with some 20 million cars on the road, is their biggest U.S. market. Yet, unsurprisingly, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers vigorously opposed the legislation, taking out a full-page ad in the Sacramento Bee, denouncing it as a punitive car tax.

In the past, feebates have been proposed in Maryland, Connecticut and California. But they haven't yet been enacted anywhere except Washington, D.C., in the modest form of a somewhat higher registration fee for gas guzzlers and a somewhat lower one for hybrids. A big barrier: The federal government sees feebate programs as the states' interfering with CAFE, which has landed California in litigation in the past.

Ruskin says that when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions, the states are tired of waiting for the feds to take action. "I'm reluctant to leave anything up to the federal government," he says. "They have failed to take action. [CAFE] is still in deliberation. We don't know what it will achieve. We don't know what will pass. We don't know if it will be vetoed. We don't know if there are enough votes to override, if it's vetoed. We don't know if it will be held up in court. There's no certainty here."

Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity agrees. "We need a better response than we'll make the average SUV get 35 miles a gallon by 2020," she says. "We have to do way better than that, and we can." She suggests raising gas taxes to account for carbon emissions, or putting a cap on carbon emissions of the whole fleet of new vehicles, instead of just regulating their miles per gallon. But for the moment, CAFE is the best existing instrument for change -- however puttering it may be.

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