The Need for CAFE Standards Is Gone, So Let’s Be Realistic about Fuel Efficiency
By Merrill Matthews
The Trump administration is trying to strike a blow for rational and honest government, so you know it’s getting a lot of pushback.
President Trump wants to roll back unattainable Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards imposed by President Obama, and it wants those revised fuel efficiency ratings to apply nationwide, including California. But the Golden State and environmentalists are rejecting the change. They prefer to live the “impossible dream.”
The original CAFE standards, which regulate car and light truck fuel economy, were passed by Congress in 1975, following the Arab oil embargo. The embargo exposed the vulnerability of a United States too dependent on other countries for oil.
Congress’s goal was to push carmakers toward more fuel-efficient cars so the US would be less dependent on countries that might use crude oil as a political hammer. But like so many worthy policy goals, politics soon began to drive the agenda.
Both the National Highway and Transportation Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency oversee the program, which regulates “how far vehicles must travel on a gallon of fuel.”
Arriving at the estimated miles per gallon for cars and light trucks is complicated—and many are skeptical of the process. A 2015 AAA survey found that one-third of Americans do not believe a particular car’s mpg rating.
However, the Obama administration saw CAFE as a political opportunity as well as an environmental statement. And so, Obama dramatically raised the fuel efficiency ratings.
The White House boasted in its August, 2012, announcement: “The Obama Administration today finalized groundbreaking standards that will increase fuel economy to the equivalent of 54.5 mpg for cars and light-duty trucks by Model Year 2025.”
Note that the Obama administration imposed the latest round of fuel-efficiency increases three months before the 2012 presidential election. Who thinks that was a coincidence?
The car manufacturers usually grumble whenever the politicians and bureaucrats decide to significantly increase the standards, but they eventually play along because they know ideologically driven bureaucrats and environmentalists can make their lives miserable.
So, it is refreshing that the Trump administration is trying to return to reality—or at least a little closer to it. The administration wants to freeze CAFE standards at 2020 levels: about 43.7 mpg for cars and 31.3 mpg for light trucks.
Those levels may still be unrealistic and can only be achieved by carmakers averaging in their electric cars. Indeed, the federal requirement to meet unrealistic CAFE standards is one of the chief reasons carmakers invest so much money developing and marketing money-losing electric cars that only a handful of Americans will buy.
The fact is we no longer need CAFE standards to ensure no country can hold the US as an energy hostage. Our oil and gas companies are ensuring both our energy security and independence.
That doesn’t mean carmakers will stop trying to make more fuel-efficient cars and light trucks—because that’s what consumers want from the vehicles, mostly trucks and SUVs, they choose to buy. But it does mean a little realism has returned to the process, much to the chagrin of the political left that basks in fake numbers.
(Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas)
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