EPA's CAFE Standards
Miles Per Cob - New York Times
This article in the NY Times prompted me to write about what I think should be happening with regards to the CAFE standards. They propose that it become the "Carbon Alternative Fuel Equivalent," which is fine, but they say that the proposed changes to the CAFE standards misses the point. I think they are overly focused on ethanol as a solution. We need more fuel efficient cars, period. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made this point clearly (and presciently, only months after 9/11) here. There is not enough ethanol available to make a huge difference in our overall gas needs, as Howard Simons notes in his article on TheStreet.com:
We could run through a similar exercise with
ethanol. If we distilled the entire U.S. corn crop and used none of it
for human or livestock consumption, we could displace 85 days of
gasoline consumption.
That is not to say ethanol cannot help us in our current situation - it can. But not nearly as much as revised CAFE standards. But really, we don't even need to revise the standards themselves. All we need to do is mandate that the car companies meet the existing standards, which EPA is going to revise. But these are not the CAFE standards, they are the "Guide" standards, which are revised to better reflect real world driving. The Guide numbers have been revised downward since 1985, and EPA is going to revise them downward again. It is unlikely to happen, but if we did away with the 2 standards and required companies to meet the revised numbers, including light trucks, we would realize a huge savings in fuel use. This would obviously have to happen over time, but the savings would probably allow us to be energy independent.
This article in the NY Times prompted me to write about what I think should be happening with regards to the CAFE standards. They propose that it become the "Carbon Alternative Fuel Equivalent," which is fine, but they say that the proposed changes to the CAFE standards misses the point. I think they are overly focused on ethanol as a solution. We need more fuel efficient cars, period. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made this point clearly (and presciently, only months after 9/11) here. There is not enough ethanol available to make a huge difference in our overall gas needs, as Howard Simons notes in his article on TheStreet.com:
We could run through a similar exercise with
ethanol. If we distilled the entire U.S. corn crop and used none of it
for human or livestock consumption, we could displace 85 days of
gasoline consumption.
That is not to say ethanol cannot help us in our current situation - it can. But not nearly as much as revised CAFE standards. But really, we don't even need to revise the standards themselves. All we need to do is mandate that the car companies meet the existing standards, which EPA is going to revise. But these are not the CAFE standards, they are the "Guide" standards, which are revised to better reflect real world driving. The Guide numbers have been revised downward since 1985, and EPA is going to revise them downward again. It is unlikely to happen, but if we did away with the 2 standards and required companies to meet the revised numbers, including light trucks, we would realize a huge savings in fuel use. This would obviously have to happen over time, but the savings would probably allow us to be energy independent.
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