Here we go again. Barack Obama, the green machine president, has announced stiff fuel economy standards for new cars. Significant reductions in carbon dioxide output and other nasty tailpipe emissions is the goal. The plan is laudable, and it won't work.
It won't work because grand energy and environmental plans almost never work. We have seen this script many times before and the ending is predictable: Nice ideas, like nice guys, finish last.
Anyone old enough to remember Jimmy Carter will remember the U.S. national energy policy, born after the Arab-led oil embargo, which had propelled oil prices to painful levels and created a climate of fear. The world was running out of oil and alternatives had to be found in a hurry, or else we'd be roller-skating to work and using candles to make popcorn one kernel at a time.
The energy plan, a masterpiece in failed central planning, plowed fortunes of taxpayers' money into new forms of energy, none of which worked in the commercial sense.
Meanwhile, in Canada, the national energy program granted billions to oil companies to find Arctic oil that didn't exist, wasn't needed or was too expensive to pump.
Then came CAFE - the corporate average fuel economy standard - introduced in the United States in 1985 and designed to ramp up the fuel efficiency of the barge-like American (and by extension, Canadian) automobile fleet. In truth, CAFE's continent-size loopholes laid the foundation for the SUV mania of the future.
The regulations imposed tight fuel economy standards on passenger cars but not on light trucks, which were technically classified as farm vehicles.
As a result, cars got smaller, less comfortable and less popular. Buyers migrated to SUVs and other types of light trucks, which grew fatter every model year because they didn't face the same fuel consumption restrictions. With beasts like the Ford Expedition, Chevy Tahoe and Dodge Ram clogging the roads, average fuel consumption rates soared. But, hey, you could roll down to the Starbucks in 2½ tonnes of leather-clad luxury.
The epic exercises in changing our fuel-gobbling, planet-warming habits went from national to global in the early 1990s, with the Kyoto agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They have gone up every year since then. No doubt the Copenhagen climate change conference in December, designed to launch a successor to Kyoto, will set the stage for another failure.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama. The new regulations announced by the President are an acknowledgment that the old CAFE standards were a failure. The new ones will require cars to average 39 miles per gallon by 2016, against the current fleet average for cars of 27.5 mpg. Light trucks will be required to get 30 mpg. The Obama administration is imposing nationwide limits on carbon dioxide emissions alongside the tougher CAFE standards (though the two sets of regulations will effectively work in tandem).
Media around the world have hailed the new regulations as a godsend for the planet. A new generation of smaller and ever-so-clean autos, some powered by electricity, others possibly by hydrogen or natural gas, would clear the smelly old brutes from the road. "America's gas guzzlers on road to extinction," declared The Guardian newspaper.
Dream on. The technology to create dramatically cleaner cars does not exist. In fact, most of the improvements in fuel efficiency and carbon-dioxide reduction came in the late 1990s and the early part of this decade. Since then, the gains have been marginal and there is no breakthrough technology on the horizon.
Even if a dazzling new car battery were imminent, how would it be recharged?
The visionary greenies say vast solar- and wind-power farms will do the job, with a new fleet of nuclear generating stations picking up the slack. Nice idea, but here's the reality. Keith Rattie, the CEO of Questar, a big U.S. natural gas company, says solar and wind power account for just one-sixth of 1 per cent - 0.0016 - of annual U.S. energy consumption. Mr. Obama wants to double that amount. If that happens, the fraction will rise to one-third of 1 per cent. As for nuclear power development, it is, still, in its post-Chernobyl rut.
Buyers' tastes are another matter. There is little evidence that North Americans want fuel-efficient cars if it means driving pygmy machines. Even Europe's love affair with small cars is waning. Big cars rule and the Asian and Detroit auto makers, if they survive, will deliver what buyers want. Consumer demand has a habit of overriding regulations.
The upshot, barring a tripling of oil prices, is that Mr. Obama's fuel efficiency drive will sputter out, at worst, or be achieved many years after 2016, at best. This, of course, does not mean the effort should not have been made, but real progress will demand more than regulations. With technology clearly inadequate to underwrite the Obama fuel-efficiency revolution, how about diverting some of the bank and auto bailout loot to a national R&D fund?
