Energy Debate Misses the Point in the Senate

An article from the Planet Ark website talks about the Senate putting off a vote on stricter fuel-consumption laws for vehicles sold in the U.S., and rejecting a bill by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) to raise the minimum fuel economy of automobiles to 40 miles per gallon and SUVS to 27.5 mpg by 2016.

My question is... why?

Toward the bottom of the article, there's a quote by Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) regarding the reason for voting against Durbin's bill:

Bond said stricter CAFE rules will bring further woes upon hard-pressed US automakers and impose "Soviet-style mandates" for them to build lighter, flimsier models.

Durbin's plan "costs lives, costs jobs and deprives consumers of their basic free will," Bond said.

So many things are going on in just this one quote that I have to address them all. The rest of the article speaks for itself - it's typical Republican fear-mongering about losing jobs and affecting corporations' bottoms lines, etc.

But look at what Bond said here: "stricter CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) rules will bring further woes upon hard-pressed US automakers." Look at the language he uses. Woes, hard-pressed, etc. The effort is to make these companies sound like they're downtrodden and fighting for their lives. The reality is that THEY are the ones who have gotten themselves into these jams by not producing vehicles that thought beyond the next five years or so.

The world has known forever that oil is not a renewable resource. At some point, it's going to run out. And despite that, corporations are acting like there's nothing going on at all, as if oil will always be our number one form of energy and we'll be able to go on forever sucking it out of the ground and running our big behemoth cars with it.

Well, that's obviously not the case. Fuel prices in the US have skyrocketed over the past couple years. We're actually approaching European standards for fuel prices, which I personally think is a good thing - it'll force people to seek other forms of transportation and hopefully condense some of the sprawl that we're undergoing in our major cities. And that'll curtail the need to for so many cars - more people will have the opportunity to take public transportation and hopefully massive highways full of cars will become a thing of the past.

But the automakers obviously don't want this. Their existence is the antithesis of what we NEED as manufacturers in this country. They claim it's too expensive to force better fuel consumption standards and will cause cars to become more dangerous. Again, I call foul.

The technology has existed for years to make cars more economical to own and operate. The engineers at the various companies have had such technology for a long time. Example: Hydraulic Launch Assist technology was displayed at the 2002 North American Auto Show in Detroit. Yet it's not being used anywhere yet. It's been displayed in neat little concept cars at other auto shows, but on a production vehicle? NO! And there are other examples of this as well.

The one example of this technology that has made it out of the engineers' booths and into production is hybrid technology - and the cars are so popular that Ford, Toyota, and Honda can't keep them in stock. So why not make MORE of these models? And why aren't companies like GM doing it as well?

The answer you're always going to hear is COST. Well, no innovation ever was ever created for free. You have to put money into technology to get it to market. But at the rate these vehicles are leaving the lots, the potential for profit on these models is certainly there!

To move on with the Bond quotes: the second thing that jumped out at me was his use of the term "Soviet-style mandates." Senator Bond is trying to use old Cold War paranoia to scare everyone away from doing what needs to be done. And this has been a memetic tactic of the conservatives for a couple decades now.

Instead of doing what needs to be done, conservatives claim that they don't want to turn us into a totalitarian state like the old Soviet Union. It's very interesting how that applies when it comes to economic issues, but as soon as the debate turns to social issues, they're more than happy to put us all under the yoke of their "moral" tyranny.

Using fear tactics like this is something the GOP used to great effect in the last election - fear of terrorists and "immoral" policies like those that the Democrats want to put into place (supposedly, anyway) scared many voters into voting for Bush, Delay, and their cronies. The Democrats need to figure out a way to make this look as ridiculous as it really is.

The final sentence in Bond's comments are that "Durbin's plan 'costs lives, costs jobs and deprives consumers of their basic free will,' Bond said."

Again, the fear-mongering is apparent in the first two sound bits - "costs lives, costs jobs." The lives thing is again ridiculous. SUVs and their ilk are much more dangerous than smaller, lighter cars - it's been proven time and time again. Costing jobs is ridiculous as well - the reason American jobs are being lost is that foreign products are becoming BETTER. Again, look at the hybrid car example. American corporations are afraid to change because it looks bad for the short-term bottom line.

The last line is the most preposterous of all, however: "deprives consumers of their basic free will." Fear-mongering aside, the notion that American consumers deserve the free will to drive big, gas-guzzling automobiles simply shows how out of touch the conservatives are with the rest of the world. Oil use (around 40% of which comes from the operation of automobiles) needs to go down. I've already addressed that. But how about the free will of the rest of the planet? How about the free will of people in other countries, who are facing the onset of massive global climate change because of the use of petroleum-based energy production? What about their basic free will?

More and more, I want to trumpet the words of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In an essay written in Dec. 2003, he stated that the environmental degradation of the world isn't just an economic or weather issue: it's a civil rights issue. The rich and affluent of the world think they have a basic human right to do whatever they want to the environment, while the poor are the ones who bear the brunt of the effects of it. Read the essay, it goes into detail that I don't have room to here.

Until this country realizes that it has a responsibility to the rest of the world, we're never going to get better. And the insular policies of the conservatives aren't helping. Comments like Bond's only make the point clearer.