Senate approves plan for increasing mileage
June 22nd, 2007 by ashish
Imagine the power of the automotive industry. For 32 years, Congress has not imposed a new auto efficiency mandate, and the last one had set the limit in a different era. In that much time, one would have expected the industry to have got more efficient, and produce vehicles that use much less gas. This would have spun off into better vehicle emissions, less pollution, less operating cost, and reduced America’s reliance on oil from outside. America get huge amounts of oil from the Middle East, Venezuela, and Africa, and the inflated price of oil gives an inflated head to the dictators running most of these countries.
There is always comparisons made with other industries, with the auto industry coming way off in terms of attempts to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. Most of research in the auto industry is geared towards how to make more attractive vehicles, more of SUV’s (and more of gas-guzzlers such as the Hummer) and much much less of how to make the gallon go longer. However, given that the auto industry has a very strong lobby, it has been difficult to try and get legislation in this area, and even current legislation is weak, asking for new limits for the year 2020 (13 years from now), and typically vehicles incorporating these new limits will not be on the road till another 15-17 years from now.
The new bill has a few beneficial measures, such as protection against price gouging, and tries to put more money for alternate energy promotion such as ethanol.
The Senate passed an energy bill late Thursday that includes an increase in automobile fuel economy, new laws against energy price-gouging and a requirement for huge increases in the production of ethanol. In an eleventh-hour compromise fashioned after two days of closed-door meetings, an agreement was reached to increase average fuel economy by 40 percent to 35 miles per gallon for cars, SUVs and pickup trucks by 2020.
Democrats also were unable to include in the bill a requirement for electric utilities to produce at least 15 percent of their electricity from renewable fuels such as wind and biomass. Senators from the South objected, saying the region couldn’t meet such a standard, and Republicans refused to let the measure come up for a vote. But the legislation provides a bonanza to farmers and the ethanol industry. It requires ethanol production to grow to at least 36 billion gallon a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase of the amount of ethanol processed last year.
One would think that all these are laudable measures, that would save more money in America, and save the money of people having to spend high amounts for fuel. Can one forget all the news that one has been reading over the past few months describing how people have been changing their habits due to the high gas cost.
But there is active pressure against the bill, with a lot of strategies about how to block the bill, and how to remove the blockages against the bill. In addition, this bill needs to be approved in a similar form by the House, and that will also have its own challenges. Is it possible that lobbying will fail when confronted by common good. Very naiive, right ?
