Some soccer moms will have to give up hulking SUVs. Carpenters will still haul materials around in pickup trucks, but they will cost more. Nearly everybody else will drive smaller cars, and more of them will run on electricity. The higher mileage and emissions standards set by the Obama administration on Tuesday, which begin to take effect in 2012 and are to be achieved by 2016, will transform the American car and truck fleet.
No, it won't. Setting standards for American car makers does nothing to require foreign car makers to reach the same goals. If foreign cars are cheaper, Americans will buy more foreign cars, without the magical MPG requirement... thus doing more to kill American car makers.
But that's not the point. The real point I want to make is why 35.5 MPG? Why not, if we don't care about the laws of physics or the realities of technological improvement methodologies, just set the MPG requirement to 3,000 MPG? Pick any number, any number will do. What's so magical about 35.5? Is it the numerology equivalent of B.O. or something?
It's lunacy and a ruse to placate the greens. These targets are never met and they're adjusted to jive with whatever happens in the future.
In addition, they're outside the Obama Administration's electoral control... it's wonderful and sleazy to make a standard that you won't be around to take responsibility for (2016), when it doesn't happen.
Obama has no problem taking credit for something that won't happen (or doing the opposite of what he says he's going to do). Everyone who follows these things knows it won't happen, but we're all supposed to be celebrating the announcement of a standard that won't be met, a plan that would put the final nail in the U.S. auto maker's coffin if enforced, an action that adds unnecessary costs, and reeks of totalitarian, central-planning control of our purchase decisions.
Simply put to these unconstitutional regulations of business: F.O.!
Color me unimpressed and not celebrating this nonsense.
Update: He says it much better: “…And Sawtooth Gearing On The Belgian Design!” (Francis W. Porretto - Eternity Road, May 20, 2009):
Your Curmudgeon, a physicist by education, is not amused. Not this time. As Steven Milloy points out, there will be consequences. Some of those consequences will be fatal.
The internal combustion engine, despite its seeming shortcomings, is the most advanced powerplant available to the automotive industry. Its combination of compactness, performance, efficiency, and safety has every other method of generating kinetic energy from a portable fuel beat all to Hell. If you need evidence to this effect, consider how doggedly -- and futilely -- the world's automakers have struggled to obsolete this device. They've tried steam engines, Stirling engines, electric motors, gas turbines, fuel cells...everything but sorcery. The IC engine still rules the road.
RTWT.
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