WASHINGTON – Ceaseless chatter about expensive gas at the height of the “driving season” (isn’t every season the driving season in the United States?) has become as much a part of the summer scene as patriotic bunting and barbecue tips. And just as predictable.
Which is why, for the first time in years, I was planning to take a pass on the whole subject.
How many times can you lament the great American infatuation with gas-guzzling SUVs? How often can you point out that it’s our unquenchable thirst for oil – not the failure to give the oil companies tax breaks or the desire to keep some pristine lands beyond the reach of their drills, or even our blundering in the Middle East – that’s most responsible for the price at the pump? Too often. Year after year, Washington has been stuck in a stalemate that produces plenty of stunts – anyone for another news conference at the corner gas station? – and no solutions.
Talk about political climate change.
The Senate, usually steeped in stasis, has suddenly lurched forward. For the first time in a generation, it has broken an impasse that’s kept us from doing much to reduce gas consumption since people wore leisure suits and debated the pardon of Richard Nixon. The vote to raise fuel-economy standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2020 for cars, trucks and sport-utility vehicles was that long in coming. And it’s that much of a milestone.
“This is a huge step forward,” says Michelle Robinson, director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
For years – 32, to be precise – the automobile industry and its unions argued that nudging fuel-economy standards up from where they were set in 1975 would: disadvantage American companies in the face of global competition; force such economic hardship on Detroit that it would lay off thousands of workers; require American consumers to give up their unconstrained right to choose whatever kind of vehicle suits their fancy.
And during the past generation – without Congress having raised the fuel-economy requirements – this is what happened: American automakers made corporate decisions that disadvantaged them against nimbler, foreign-owned companies such as Toyota and Honda. They ended up laying off thousands of workers. America’s love affair with sport-utility vehicles began to cool as gas prices climbed and drivers sought smaller alternatives – even hybrids.
With its arguments discredited, Detroit didn’t so much surrender.
It sunk beneath a rising tide of public and political concern about the links between our excessive energy use, our excessive contribution to global warming and our precarious reliance on the Middle East for so much of our oil.
Of course, there was much more the Senate could have done.
Republicans notably blocked an effort to shift tax subsidies from the oil and gas industries to breaks that would benefit renewable energy producers. But heck, let’s call a once-in-decades change what it is: A great leap forward.
Besides boosting average fuel standards, the Senate closed the SUV loophole. This would force automakers to include SUVs and other light trucks in overall fleet fuel averages instead of carving out a separate category for them.
The loophole is an artifact of the 1975 law, written at a time when the Chevy Suburban really was used for camping in the back country and pickups were driven by people who needed to haul equipment to work.
Detroit infamously exploited the loophole to usher in the era of the minivan and the SUV, selling them as suburban necessities and sending drivers to office parks and soccer fields in behemoths whose form bears no relation to their current function. Despite a recent downturn in sales, about half of all vehicle sales still are SUVs and light trucks. They deserve to be treated alongside the rest of the passenger fleet.
The new mileage requirements that the Senate wants would save about 1.2 million barrels of oil a day, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That’s about what we currently import daily from Saudi Arabia. The bipartisan House bill on fuel-economy standards, sponsored by Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Todd Platts, R-Pa., goes further, but faces an uncertain political fate.
Still, the political momentum is clearly with those who have at last provided some meaningful content after all those years of empty sound bites about shared sacrifice.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco@washpost.com.
(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers Group AP-NY
