Lean Left

Finally a Good Move - Such as it Is More Mush From the Chimp

by KTK

January 30th, 2007

Gregg Easterbrook makes a reasonable point, here, but I think he gets carried away with himself.

Last week Bush proposed something environmentalists, energy analysts, greenhouse-effect researchers, and national-security experts have spent 20 years pleading for: a major strengthening of federal mileage standards for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks [at the rate of 4% per year]. The No. 1 failing of U.S. energy policy is that vehicle mile-per-gallon standards have not been made stricter in two decades. Nothing the United States can do in energy policy is more important than an mpg increase. Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and, until last week, George W. Bush had all refused to face the issue of America’s low-mpg vehicles, which are the root of U.S. dependency on Persian Gulf oil and a prime factor in rising U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But now Bush favors a radical strengthening of federal mileage rules, and last week to boot became the first Republican president since Gerald Ford to embrace the basic concept of federal mileage regulation (called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard). . . .

Does 4 percent improvement per year sound too modest? According to the EPA, average actual fuel consumption of new vehicles sold in the United States is 21 miles per gallon. . . . Improve on 21 mpg by 4 percent annually for 10 years, and the number rises to 31 mpg. If the actual fuel economy of new vehicles were 31 mpg, oil-consumption trends would reverse—from more oil use to less.

This is a distinct advance, and it is something environmentalists and energy policy wonks have been screaming for for years. In fairness, that deserves to be recognized. But Easterbrook’s main point is that the press have been unfair in failing to fall all over Bush for these moderate steps, long overdue.

This should have been Page One headline material—PRESIDENT CALLS FOR DRAMATIC MPG REGULATIONS. Instead, most news organizations pretended Bush’s mpg proposal did not exist, or buried the story inside the paper, or made only cryptic references to it. In his 2006 State of the Union address, when Bush said America was “addicted to oil” but proposed no mpg improvements, critics rightly pummeled the president. Now Bush has backed the needed reform, and the development is being downplayed or even ridiculed. . . .

Bear in mind that since 1988, Republicans have doggedly opposed stricter fuel-economy rules, denouncing the CAFE system in venomous language as intruding on a supposed “right” to drive wasteful, large vehicles. . . . Now, George W. Bush has embraced the system of mandatory federal mpg standards, asking they become much stricter. For this he’s denounced!

Easterbrook attributes this to . . . (say it with me now) . . . liberal press bias. (”[M]ainstream news organizations and pundits are bought and sold on a narrative of Bush as an environmental villain and simply refuse to acknowledge any evidence that contradicts the thesis. . . . [E]ditors and pundits feel Bush must be ridiculed on all scores . . . .”) But Easterbrook himself notes that it’s the GOP that has blocked any increase in CAFE standards from the beginning, and in fact refuses even to accept them as reasonable policy. Bush has proposed a first-year increase in average fuel efficiency of less than one mpg (while the proposed, delayed, minimal standards for SUVs do almost nothing about their increasingly poor performance). And the benefit to this supposedly heroic plan? Easterbrook calculates that it would finally end the growth of consumption of oil . . . in ten years. (Bush’s overall goal of a 20% total reduction in oil use, mainly by increasing gasahol usage - which is better than nothing, certainly - would move our total consumption to its lowest level since . . . 1991. Great. Let’s not end global warming, let’s just increase global warming at the rate at which it first began to be an obvious problem.) Easterbrook also notes that critics have emphasized that the plan makes no overt effort to address global warming as a goal - its rationale is stated entirely in terms of costs to consumers and foreign oil dependence - and in fact does not even mention global warming. Aside from oil consumption targets, its most important provisions - alternative energy and non-petroleum-powered vehicles - are unspecified and undefined. But Easterbrook can think of no reason for these criticisms than “press bias”?

These are all reasonable criticisms. The plan is a major improvement on stonewalling, oil-industry protectionism, global warming denial, shameless toadying to Saudi oil interests, and rampant anti-environmentalism. But since it was Bush himself who was doing the stonewalling, payoffs, denial, toadying, and destruction, why should he get credit for stopping? And the absolute benefits of the plan - not the degree of departure they represent from his grossly backward policies to date, but the actual degree of good they will finally do - are modest at best. Worse, they do almost nothing to stave off the potential disaster that is the gravest environmental problem of the carbon economy.

This is simply the Bush life story in a nutshell: constantly demanding, and receiving, special praise for the most minimally decent ordinary behavior, and for overcoming problems he himself created. What’s his accomplishment as “the environmental President”? That he’s no longer an obnoxious oil-company shill? (And frankly, the jury’s going to be out a long time on that one, too.) Recall that in the same speech, Bush proposed a plan to elminate the federal deficit - in the last year of his successor’s term in office - without ever mentioning that he had actually inherited a $127 billion surplus from Clinton when he himself took office! He now wants credit for reversing his own environmental destruction policies the same way he wants credit for eliminating his own deficit. In his seventh year in office, his popularity in the tank, having seen his party trashed at the polls through his own bungling, he has now proposed policies that have been blocked by his party for over 20 years and won’t make an immediate, or in the long term decisive, dent in the precise problem to which his entire family owe their wealth and which he has worked to increase throughout his business and political life. A guy who publicly mocks a death-row prisoner’s religious conversion now expects us to take this seriously?

There is a “Nixon to China” aspect of this whole farce: given the GOP’s entrenched anti-environmental, pro-big-business, and pro-oil stance, it may be that only a miserable failure oil company executive Republican President could remove the GOP roadblock to sane policy. But, as with Nixon and China, it was the GOP itself, and notably Bush, who created the anti-environmental mentality that made it impossible for anyone else to implement a reasonable policy. Why they - and Bush above all - constantly get praise for reversing their own stupid blunders I can’t imagine. Let’s be glad for this first step toward a better oil policy, but let’s not lose sight of why it took so long, what it took to force Bush to this point, and what its - deliberately imposed - limitations are.

UPDATE: It’s worse than I realized. Bush is not just demanding credit for undoing his own damage, he’s demanding credit for increasing the damage while lying about it. The actually policy proposal, as opposed to the State of the Union washjob, makes it clear that Bush is committing to nothing while attempting to ease restrictions on automobile manufacturers and eliminate the CAFE statute entirely. See comments.

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