Why would be shocked that Norm Mineta favors government edicts?

A better question might be, why is that guy still in the Cabinet when so many people who were actually Republicans are gone from the first Bush cabinet?

That said, I don't understand why Hummers get off so easily, but smaller SUVs get pounded by the mileage requirements. The new regs are bad enough, but the notion that those who can afford a $50,000 SUV don't have to "sacrifice" with the rest of us poor SOBs makes it bad politics as well as bad policy.

Wait, wasn't it Mineta who also floated the notion that "important" govt types and other elites might start getting express treatment at airport security check in?

Yeah, this is a guy who really deserves still to be in the Cabinet. I'm sure there were no free-market conservatives who could have taken over.

He's not just been the best Transportation Secretary ever but one of the best cabinet secretaries ever.

I still say CAFE is a classic example of bad 'government mandates are free' command-economy thinking.

If you want to raise gas taxes by $1/gallon instead, be my guest; it'll do the same thing and better.

Mike:

What if you want businesses to upgrade outdated physical plants?

Question for you, oj: whatever happened to station wagons?

A dynamic and innovative auto industry is one thing Europe has over the US. It is a wonder what $5 gas does to innovation.

Gas prices will do what CAFE standards can't. CAFE allows "gaming" by allowing each company to produce a model or two that raises the "average" even if no one buys those models.

High Gas prices force the companies to actually innovate and build a good car.

US car companies, coddled by cheap gas, have actually become "finance" companies, not manufacturers. GM should be allowed to go the way of the Dodo. Ford may have a chance.

Absent the ability to sell big trucks, they will have to start to build cars again, or die.

joe:

they became SUVs. If they still made the Country Squire with the seat in the way back no one would own a truck.

Bruno:

Yes, the standards need to be more serious.

Bruno:

Yes, the standards need to be more serious.

OJ:

Yes, and it was CAFE that killed the Country Squire; they had to turn it into a 'truck' to meet the standards.

If you want businesses to upgrade physical plant, keep interest rates low and avoid deranged corporate tax schemes. If there's still no profit in upgraded them they weren't obsolete; getting the last puffs out of a cigar stump is simple thrift.

joe:

Yes, the failure to apply the standards to trucks is an obvious mistake.

The failure to apply the standard to trucks is due to the fact that you can't. A truck that gets 40mpg isn't a truck, it may look like one but it won't be able to haul or tow anything. That was why the light-truck exemption in the first place, and you know the rest. A more perfect example of ruling-class spite blowing up in ruling-class faces than CAFE you will never see in your life. The Naderites set off on a jihad against the station wagon, and thirty years later the freeways are full of, you guessed it, station wagons, only now on truck frames and sporting 4-wheel-drive that sucks down an extra 7 or 8 miles per gallon per vehicle.

joe:

Sure it will. You just need to force the innovation.

No it won't. Some constraints are fundamental, and this is one of them. If you made it illegal for chairs to have legs, you'd wind up sitting on the floor, there's no market innovation that's going to save you from that. Gravity has the last word there. So also with trucks.

joe:

it'll never fly, Orville.

You can fly a brick if you put a big enough engine on it, Wilbur.

And if it were more economical we'd make them.

If it were really more economical you wouldn't have to.

Yes, you would. It's why Japan and Germany ended up with better manufacturing than us. We destroyed their plants but wouldn't change our own.

Can I throw out what may be a very naive question to Michael and the other economic whizzkids here? If dependency on Mid-East oil is a national security Achilles Heel but the public still has a fit of the vapors over every ten-cent price rise, why not forget about taxes, etc. and just set a guaranteed floor or blended price high enough to bring the Alberta Oil Sands on line? I realize price controls are generally anathema, but this is national security and its hard to imagine the logistics of a serious black market in refined oil.

CAFE doesn't work the way that you think it does, Orrin.

CAFE may drive some technical innovation - but not as much as the eternal quest for more horsepower.

As others in this thread have touched on, mostly what CAFE does is force weight reductions: Manufacturers and consumers choose smaller, lighter vehicles, which of course also leads to more deaths on the highways and byways.

If we want to force the American public to consume less fuel, forget CAFE, and cut to the chase: Banning SUVs would save a lot more fuel than this measly 6% requirement.

Or, just slap a $ 10,000 tax on any vehicle that gets less than 15.5 MPG, that's purchased by anyone without a Tax ID number (EIN).
Plenty of people will simply run out and get an EIN, of course, but it would sharply reduce sales of SUVs and pick-'em-ups to urbanites.

CAFE doesn't force anything - it just raises taxes on manufacturers who fail to meet an average fuel economy standard. Whether the problem is solved through lighter vehicles, weaker engines, hybrids, fuel cells, or higher prices on light trucks (which should have been included from the start) is an issue for the manufacturers and consumers (aka the market) to decide. The government doesn't really care how it's done, as long as it gets done.

Just think about this: the idea that raising CAFE standards would be a boon to consumers presumes that absent CAFE, consumers are too stupid to buy more fuel efficient cars. I mean, if it's really such a boon, why would the government have to do anything?

Peter, I'd like to throw this out for you to think on. It's commonly said that our biggest security vulnerability is that our economy depends too much on foreign oil. In fact our our biggest vulnerability is that our economy depends too much on cities. Osama's crew didn't blow up a bunch of SUVs on 9/11, they blew up office buildings, the biggest ones they could find. They did that because that's where the people were, some 30,000 on a 16-acre site. Four years later we've got guys in Iraq and Afghanistan sweating it out so Manhattanites can enjoy a latte in a kill zone. If we really want government to increase security it should herd these people up and move them out, says I. Give every last one of them a brand-new Suburban, tell them to find a spot on the prairie, and task them to recreate the same level of economic activity we enjoyed before. As oj says, you have to force people to innovate.

If we really want government to increase security it should herd these people up and move them out, says I. Give every last one of them a brand-new Suburban, tell them to find a spot on the prairie, and task them to recreate the same level of economic activity we enjoyed before. As oj says, you have to force people to innovate

Orrin said that? Was that before or after he called for all that investment in urban mass transit? No matter, if its good enough for Orrin, it's good enough for me. I won't worry that Pol Pot said it too if you won't.

I do worry but he sure doesn't.

Michael:

Just use composite metals to make SUVs lighter but stronger.

James:

Yes, failure to meet the standards has to mean you don't get to sell the vehicle.

Pol Pot opposed technological innovation.

By the way, Peter: every device you can use to make SUV owners' lives miserable you can also use to make city-dwellers' lives miserable, and you can justify it by the same sort of reasoning. You can levy extra taxes on them to offset the military costs of defending their lifestyles. You can force them to make their apartment houses and office towers and subways completely bombproof, and hang the cost. Heck, if I were in charge every New Yorker for starters would get issued a flashlight, a pair of coveralls, a hard hat and a Geiger counter. Let 'em spend an hour or two every day after work down at Port Authority scrabbling through shipping containers to make sure nobody's trying to smuggle in a nuke. Of course the class whose ox would be getting gored then would be the urban blue-staters instead of the red-state suburbanites they despise.

joe:

Cirty dwellers have much lower rates of car ownership and use--they won't mind these steps. Indeed, boosting tolls and congestion and parking fees will lower their taxes.

Then obviously we'll need to boost other things as well. Just tax them out of their cities, oj.

the cars certainly--you don't need them in cities.

No, the people out of the cities. They're not safe there, after all.

that's already happening.

So is a shift to smaller vehicles with gas at $2.50

Not according to sales figures. $2.50 is chump change.

Then what's your problem in the first place? If it's that gov't will have nothing to do, well, see above. Get to work at getting the population properly dispersed. That should keep your spite satisfied for the rest of your natural life, you ought to be in pig heaven at the prospect of telling people where they can't live.

joe:

No, that's the point, you don't want to manage perople and plan centrally. You just set limits to certain undesirable things and let folks figure out how to reach them on their own. They will.

No, the point is which things are considered undesireable, or whose desires get regulated and whose don't. As far as politics go that's the only point, always has been, always will be. Population densities over 250 per square mile are undesireable as far as I'm concerned, so there need to be incentives against that. By a truly astounding and totally unforeseen coincidence most people who live in such areas are Gore and Kerry voters. Isn't this fun? The only difference between us is that I'm honest about what I'm doing.

joe:

By all means, if you can get people to support that go for it. For example, 90% of Americans support raising fuel efficiency standards.

oj:

Just use composite metals to make SUVs lighter but stronger.

Sure, we can do that, but the reason that we currently don't is because it's the functional equivalent of adding a $ 10,000 tax.

Figure out how to make SUVs significantly lighter-but-stronger for no more than an extra $ 3,000 per, and then we'll really have s0mething - plus you'll be very, very rich.

No, that's the point, you don't want to manage perople and plan centrally. You just set limits to certain undesirable things and let folks figure out how to reach them on their own. They will.

Always nice to see your inner Libertarian speaking up.

Peter B:

From the article that you linked to (emph. add.):

Alberta officials say 1.6 trillion barrels of oil are locked in the sandy bitumen under the forests and "muskeg" -- bogs with scattered trees and vegetation -- that dominate the landscape. Of that, 175 billion barrels are proven reserves that can be recovered using current technology. Only Saudi Arabia has larger oil reserves. Production from 29 companies now operating in the three regions exceeds 1 million barrels per day, most of which is shipped to U.S. markets. Tar sands backers project that production will triple -- to near 3 million barrels a day by 2015. That would make it the world's fifth largest crude oil producer.

Saudi Arabia claims proven reserves of ~263 billion barrels, an unknown percentage of which are known to be fictional, which means that Canada has the world's largest oil reserves, almost as much as the rest of the world combined - although only the second largest PROVEN reserves, a distinction that is far less important when speaking of tar sands, rather than underground pools of crude oil.

The article also says that the cost of producing crude oil from tar sands has fallen to US$ 23/bbl.

So...

Canadian oil production is currently increasing by leaps and bounds, and will play an ever more important role in global oil production in the decades to come.
Since the cost of production is bound to decrease, it seems likely that Canadian oil will continue to flow in ever increasing amounts, as long as the price of oil remains above, say, US$ 19/bbl.

My personal preference is to spend a few hundred billion dollars getting an American biodiesel infrastructure up and running, which would remove any foreign threat to U.S. energy supplies, as well as giving emerging economies dependent on foreign oil a shot in the arm due to lowered global oil prices, which should redound to the U.S. economy's benefit.

A 20¢ per gallon gasoline tax dedicated to biodiesel research, and to subsidize the construction of production facilities, should do the trick pretty quickly.

Michael:

So? We have money. Put the composites in a few tens of millions of vehicles and the price will come down.

oj:

Just use composite metals to make SUVs lighter but stronger.

Sure, we can do that, but the reason that we currently don't is because it's the functional equivalent of adding a $ 10,000 tax.

Figure out how to make SUVs significantly lighter-but-stronger for no more than an extra $ 3,000 per, and then we'll really have s0mething - plus you'll be very, very rich.

No, that's the point, you don't want to manage perople and plan centrally. You just set limits to certain undesirable things and let folks figure out how to reach them on their own. They will.

Always nice to see your inner Libertarian speaking up.

Peter B:

From the article that you linked to (emph. add.):

Alberta officials say 1.6 trillion barrels of oil are locked in the sandy bitumen under the forests and "muskeg" -- bogs with scattered trees and vegetation -- that dominate the landscape. Of that, 175 billion barrels are proven reserves that can be recovered using current technology. Only Saudi Arabia has larger oil reserves. Production from 29 companies now operating in the three regions exceeds 1 million barrels per day, most of which is shipped to U.S. markets. Tar sands backers project that production will triple -- to near 3 million barrels a day by 2015. That would make it the world's fifth largest crude oil producer.

Saudi Arabia claims proven reserves of ~263 billion barrels, an unknown percentage of which are known to be fictional, which means that Canada has the world's largest oil reserves, almost as much as the rest of the world combined - although only the second largest PROVEN reserves, a distinction that is far less important when speaking of tar sands, rather than underground pools of crude oil.

The article also says that the cost of producing crude oil from tar sands has fallen to US$ 23/bbl.

So...

Canadian oil production is currently increasing by leaps and bounds, and will play an ever more important role in global oil production in the decades to come.
Since the cost of production is bound to decrease, it seems likely that Canadian oil will continue to flow in ever increasing amounts, as long as the price of oil remains above, say, US$ 19/bbl.

My personal preference is to spend a few hundred billion dollars getting an American biodiesel infrastructure up and running, which would remove any foreign threat to U.S. energy supplies, as well as giving emerging economies dependent on foreign oil a shot in the arm due to lowered global oil prices, which should redound to the U.S. economy's benefit.

A 20¢ per gallon gasoline tax dedicated to biodiesel research, and to subsidize the construction of production facilities, should do the trick pretty quickly.

I say again, an American biodiesel infrastructure.

oj:

Fine by me, if what you're proposing is that the U.S. gov't subsidize the production of SUVs by $ 10,000 per unit.

The composite-material advances ought to have enormous spillover benefits.

Boeing is leading the way in this field.

why would government subsidize them--the auitomakers and buyers will.

Re: Boeing and composite materials:

Boeing 787 Dreamliner Program Fact Sheet

Boeing unveils key new technology for the Dreamliner - Seattle PI

oj:

Really ?

Then why haven't they up until now ?

Because they won't until you make them. Businessmen almost always think in the short term--they're only human.

OJ: you are smoking dope. CAFE is a failed policy that cannot acheive any useful end other than breaking the UAW (They go when GM and Ford do). There is no problem to which CAFE is a solution except the problem of politicians wanting to look like they are doing some thing when they are in fact doing nothing.