Recent Comments:
Perverse side effects of the new CAFE standards? {Autoblog Green}
Feb 13th 2008 12:56AM I know your aim is to be an asshole, but I'm gonna respond anyway...
What I want is the economy to not totally collapse when world trade agreements shift, exporters decide to stop, and gas hits $20/gallon over the course of a month. We currently import more than 2/3 of our oil, and that addiction is just as problematic for our nation as, say, heroin, or losing a war. Withdrawal is a bitch. And I don't want your junkie ass robbing my house when you inevitably find yourself unable to fuel the Suburban.
Taxing gas arbitrarily with a revenue-neutral rebate scheme allows market action and personal initiative to reduce fuel usage without compromising flexibility of individual action.
PS: "See how long your 6000 pound suburban lasts against my Chainsaw-mobile." Now go back and think about your statement.
Perverse side effects of the new CAFE standards? {Autoblog Green}
Feb 12th 2008 5:33PM CAFE is built for loopholes. It's not that it's intentional, it's that the design of the entire thing is faulty.
Building a 100mpg NEV? Guess what, your company now has an economic incentive to bring your CAFE average down to the minimum required by selling profitable pickups.
A carmaker which brings heavy-van-microbus efficiency up from 5mpg to 10mpg, on the other hand, is ruthlessly penalized. You can't sell that, without also producing high-MPG cars.
It heavily favors a few larger companies which are required to be jack-of-all-trades in their manufacturing, and it cripples market competition with a bureaucracy.
We have a way to increase the weight consumers put on mileage. Increase gas prices. We even have a way to do it without hurting the poor, targetting only those who are currently wasting gas on low-utility activities:
Tax everybody $1/gallon, and then refund every grown American citizen with a driver's license the resulting $650/year, so the whole thing is revenue-neutral, government doesn't become dependant on the income, and people get an incentive to buy more efficient cars and use mass transit. Up both of those ammounts by 20% a year until we're equal with Europe.
