Automakers “Creamed” Over “CAFÉ”? No Way!

(And I also posted here – sorry I couldn’t work something to do with sugar into the attempted pun of the post title to make it even more obnoxious…and I’ll address the CAFÉ standards later).

This Murdoch Street Journal editorial by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. criticizes President Obama for not having the courage of a president who once championed deregulation (contrasting Obama’s treatment of the automakers with another president’s deregulation of our railroads many years ago).

And if you guessed that the president Jenkins refers to besides Obama is Jimmy Carter and not The Sainted Ronnie R (and yes, I know he got his statue here – I’ll eat a jellybean tonight in his honor, OK?), then you get to line your bird cage with the next edition of The Weekly Standard.

What Jenkins somehow fails to tell us is that (as noted here), the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 was one of a bunch of acts aimed at effectively neutering the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was formed in 1887 under President Grover Cleveland. The law that formed the commission (as Wikipedia tells us here)…

…was the result of widespread and longstanding anti-railroad agitation. Western farmers, specifically those of the Grange Movement, were the dominant force behind the unrest, but Westerners generally — especially those in rural areas — believed that the railroads possessed economic power that they systematically abused. A central issue was rate discrimination between similarly situated customers and communities. Other potent issues included alleged attempts by railroads to obtain influence over city and state governments and the widespread practice of granting free transportation in the form of yearly passes to opinion leaders (elected officials, newspaper editors, ministers, and so on) so as to dampen any opposition to railroad practices. Some behavior was presumably less common; the reporter Charles Edward Russell claimed that the railroad that served his hometown had refused to ship newsprint to a newspaper editor because the editor had attacked the railroad in print.

So basically, the ICC was formed to keep primarily the railroads in line. And that worked arguably for, oh, maybe a hundred years or so.

Yes, President Carter was trying to loosen the railroads from excessive regulation, but there’s no ICC-type governmental body currently encumbering the automakers.

But since Jenkins needs a boogeyman here – well, along come the CAFÉ standards for improving fuel economy. However, as Think Progress notes here…

…improving fuel economy is not difficult for the Big Three. As the Sierra Club explained in 2006, “The technology exists today to make all new vehicles average 40 miles per gallon within ten years.” A 2002 report by the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems of the National Research Council found that technologies existed then that “would significantly reduce fuel consumption within 15 years” — technologies that manufacturers were “already offering or introducing” in overseas markets.

What’s more, those existing technologies would hardly bankrupt the auto industry. NPR reported that technologies to raise fuel-efficiency “to around 33 mpg across the fleet pay for themselves within three to four years.” Indeed, Tom Cole of the Center for Automotive Research, said that with only about $1,000 worth of changes, “a conventional, gas-powered car could go 25 percent farther on a single gallon of gas.” The Union of Concerned Scientists designed its own highly efficient SUV comparable to the Ford Explorer that doubled its fuel economy (from 17 mpg to 30 mpg). The lifetime fuel savings paid back the additional technology cost of $2,560 in less than three years.

And as far as CAFÉ standards supposedly crippling the automakers – well, these guys seem to be doing just fine.