Some good news on mileage standards:
President Obama will announce as early as Tuesday that he will combine California’s tough new auto-emissions rules with the existing corporate average fuel economy standard to create a single new national standard, the officials said….Under the new standard, the national fleet mileage rule for cars would be roughly 42 miles a gallon in 2016. Light trucks would have to meet a fleet average of slightly more than 26.2 miles a gallon by 2016.
….The current standards are 27.5 miles a gallon for cars and about 24 miles a gallon for trucks. The new mileage and emissions rules will gradually tighten, beginning with 2011 models, until they reach the 2016 standards.
The auto industry is not expected to challenge the rule, which provides two things they have long asked for: certainty on a timetable and a single national standard.
This is really important stuff. Cap-and-trade is the centerpiece of the Waxman-Markey energy bill, and it’s a critical part of any global warming plan. (Krugman’s column today strikes the right tone on Waxman-Markey, by the way.) As important as it is, though, I think of it as sort of like a headwind, something that helps get all the ships moving in the right direction. But that’s not enough. There are plenty of other currents and eddies and storm systems that, individually, aren’t as important as pricing carbon, but put together are actually far more important. Mileage standards for cars are one of them: pricing carbon can help motivate people to drive less and buy stingier cars, but federal CAFE standards can do it a lot faster and a lot more efficiently. Cap-and-trade is no substitute.
This, of course, is why Waxman-Markey itself is about a lot more than just cap-and-trade. Over at Climate Progress, Daniel Weiss has a guest post that explains.
