This week, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to water down the fuel economy improvements Congress mandated in December’s energy bill.

That’s odd, since they’re the same fuel economy standards the trade group publicly supported when Congress passed them.

At the time, the Alliance’s president, Dave McCurdy, said they were “good for both consumers and energy security.” And in April, when NHTSA unveiled its proposed rules to enforce the energy bill’s fuel economy provisions, McCurdy said “the automakers are prepared to meet that challenge.”

It’s also odd because we’re now shelling out more than $1.5 billion every day to import petroleum. With a stronger fuel economy standard, we could redirect many of those dollars to American auto workers and factories, and save ourselves billions in the process. We could start to turn our economy around and reduce our dependence on oil — and the unstable regions of the world that export it.

Nevertheless, the Alliance is trying to undermine the most significant step the country has taken to reduce its oil dependence in the past three decades. The auto industry successfully beat back fuel economy improvements for years and now they’re suffering for it as gas guzzlers pile up unsold on dealers’ lots. The industry must drop its opposition to these new fuel economy rules. Stronger fuel economy standards would strengthen the flagging auto industry and the rest of our economy, too.

According to a recent Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report, the automakers have the technology to produce a new car and light truck fleet that can reach at least a 40-mpg average by 2020, and stronger fuel economy standards would put those more efficient vehicles on the road.

But we won’t wind up with stronger standards unless NHTSA uses a realistic price for gasoline when it does its calculations for a cost-effective standard. The agency currently is assuming that gas will cost around $2.50 a gallon between 2011 and 2030. Given today’s prices and industry projections, that’s absurd. Even the head of the Energy Information Administration, whose estimates NHTSA used, recommended that the agency use a more realistic projection for the price of gasoline.

NHTSA needs to strengthen the fuel economy standards based on realistic gas prices. In the mean time, they can tell us where we can buy $2.50 a gallon gasoline.

–Eli Hopson

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Politics, Energy/Environment .