Running on Empty
News: Hailed as an environmental victory, the Senate's energy bill falls miles per gallon short of what's possible.
June 27, 2007
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Senate Democrats were engaged in much backslapping and grandstanding last week over their passage of an energy bill that raises motor vehicle fuel efficiency standards for the first time in 30 years. "It's the beginning of a revolution in American energy policy," John Kerry said Friday of the bill, which is being positioned as a serious response to climate change and carbon fuel consumption in general. Much of the press rushed to echo such claims: The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, headlined its article "Energy bill reflects shift in political power," with the subhead, "Victory in November allowed Democrats to move focus from drilling to conservation."
There are just two problems with the Senate Democrats' self-congratulatory take on their energy bill. The first is getting anything like it passed by the House of Representatives. This week the House Energy and Commerce Committee will review the Senate bill with plans to move its own legislation, from which fuel efficiency standards are conspicuously absent. The committee's chair, Michigan Democrat John Dingell, also happens to be the man who’s perhaps most responsible for blocking increases in such standards over more than three decades. His district includes major car manufacturers as well as thousands of auto workers, and his wife, Deborah Dingell, is a onetime GM lobbyist who continues to serve in a high-profile role at the company.
The second problem is that the proud Senate Dems are measuring their achievement on the energy bill — as they do on so much else — against the past performance of the Bush administration and congressional Republicans, rather than against the possibilities for what can and should be accomplished. Senator Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, proudly compared the Senate's new energy bill with its most recent predecessor—a bill passed in 2005 that bore the mark of Dick Cheney's so-called energy task force and gave huge tax breaks to oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power companies. "Take a look at the last energy bill and then take a look at this energy bill, and take a look at the contrast," Durbin said last week. "Global warming wasn't even supposed to be mentioned in polite Republican company." This celebrated victory, then, comes in producing an energy bill superior to that of the carbon-fuel-industry shill group organized by a vice president who once said, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."
The underwhelming energy bill passed the Senate by a vote of 65 to 37. Eighteen Republicans signed on to the rise in fuel efficiency standards—some, from the Middle West, clearly doing so in exchange for a huge federally mandated increase in ethanol use over the next 15 years. The new fuel standards would demand that automakers produce new cars, light trucks, and SUVs that get an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. (The average today is 25 miles per gallon.) The United Auto Workers union and the Alliance of Auto Makers, the industry trade group, have arrayed themselves against the bill. As Bruce Andrews, Ford's vice president of government affairs, told Reuters recently, "Major changes are still needed to make this bill achievable."
While the vote was generally greeted by the Washington press as a victory for environmentalists, it is receiving mixed reviews from environmentalists themselves. Vermont's independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who has one of Congress' strongest records on environmental issues, gave the bill his reserved approval: "While this energy bill is not as strong as I would like, it is certainly a major step forward in breaking our dependence on fossil fuels and moving us toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy."
However, Tyson Slocum, one of Public Citizen's energy experts, has a harsher analysis, pointing to what he believes are the bill's fatal loopholes: "Lawmakers let automakers off the hook by not requiring them to provide real and achievable improvements in fuel economy. Instead, the bill allows for a size-based sliding scale that enables manufacturers to set their own standards. It also would allow President Bush and future administrations to go below the target of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 if they produce a cost-benefit analysis justifying a lower goal—thereby rendering the target meaningless." (Public Citizen has produced a detailed analysis of the legislation.)
The bill also lacks the meaningful levels of support for renewable energy that most environmental groups were seeking. (Remember that this is the strongest draft this bill is likely to see. The final version, which needs to be hashed out in conference between the Senate and the House, and signed by President Bush, will certainly be weaker on environmental concerns.)
Even if it does bring about token improvements, the new energy legislation represents, at the same time, just how faint-hearted the Democrats really are, even when they claim to be taking bold action. For evidence of this, we need only consider the possibilities for what could be done, given the political will.
In a July 2006 issue of the State Department’s electronic journal, Economic Perspectives, Amory B. Lovins, CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that advocates energy efficiency, described the advances that have been made possible by new materials and innovative design: "For example, an uncompromised mid-size sport utility vehicle (SUV) designed in 2000, equipped with the most popular efficiency-doubling hybrid-electric drive system, could carry five adults in comfort and up to two cubic meters of cargo, haul a half-ton up a 44 percent grade, accelerate from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in 7.2 seconds, be safer than a steel SUV even if it hits one, yet use less than a third the normal amount of gasoline, getting about 3.56 liters per hundred kilometers, or 67 miles per U.S. gallon."
And that's a modest proposal. There are more audacious ones, too. By 2009, Loremo AG, a German firm, plans to roll out the sporty Loremo LS, which gets 157 miles per gallon. As early as 2002, the Times of London reported the unveiling of Toyota’s brand new Eco Spirit, "a cheeky little coupe" that got 104 miles per gallon, "a record for a four-seat car.".
But that was the last anybody ever heard of the Spirit, which was described to one disappointed inquirer as a "concept car" with no plans for actual production in the foreseeable future.
These examples show, once again, how much these matters have to do with politics, and how little with technological or engineering capabilities. Over the last half-century there have been great strides made in electronics, space exploration, genetics, plastics—but cars just never change much. The November 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics reported: "The average gasoline consumption in the 1930s and 1940s was 15-20 miles per gallon, slightly higher for some cars."
With vast leaps in technological know-how since, the automakers, aided by their allies in government, have managed to achieve what is surely an astonishing feat: accomplishing next to nothing on fuel efficiency.
James Ridgeway is the Washington Correspondent for Mother Jones.
