Curbing gas guzzlers is the easy part

Obama's new fuel efficiency standards are ambitious and welcome. But they alone won't combat climate change

Brian Beutler
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 May 2009 18.30 BST

The good news first. The Obama administration's proposal for new vehicle emissions and fuel economy standards are extremely ambitious. And this isn't just ambitious in the way Obama's entire agenda is ambitious but sadly susceptible to the whims of Congress.
Today, Obama has the support of industry (predictably, I suppose, since he all-but-owns Detroit auto manufacturers) and of the relevant politicians in Washington DC and Michigan, so the new standards face no real opposition.
Over time, they will make an appreciable and badly-needed dent in the amount of greenhouse gas pollution Americans emit each year – something which can be celebrated equally by environmentalists and commuters who will now stand to save on fuel in the long term.
But now for the bad news. Actually, there is no bad news. Or, at least, no more bad news than there was last week. Today's announcement represents an important step forward, but it's also a relatively easy one given the political realities of the moment. And it doesn't really bring us any closer to what we desperately need to combat global warming: an economy-wide plan to price carbon emissions.
More on that in a second, though. First, let's focus on what fuel economy (Cafe) standards actually do. As far as reducing greenhouse gases goes, Cafe standards are an important, but slow-moving weapon in the policy-maker's arsenal. The standards announced today will require American cars built seven years from now (if, of course, there are any) to be significantly more fuel efficient than cars built today. But they don't do anything to address the cars on the road right now, many of which will be in working condition for years to come.
One way to get commuters to make the switch sooner would be to impose higher taxes on fuel. But such taxes aren't on the table, and without them the Cafe standards can only really limit peoples' options, not really change their behaviour. And drastic changes in behaviour – beyond the realm of individual drivers – is what the country and the world really needs. And cap-and-trade would provide that push.
Now there's a danger here of conflating the two policies, and on this point, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum offers an important caveat:
As important as [cap-and-trade] is … 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.
And that's entirely true. By pricing carbon, a cap-and-trade programme would have a tremendous number of beneficial second- and third-order ramifications, from incentivising clean energy at the provider level, to making individuals more efficiency minded and on and on down the line. Its passage would signal the beginning of the greatest overhaul of the country's economy in perhaps a century.
But unlike a direct tax on gasoline, it would do little on its own to change peoples' driving habits, or to immediately reduce the price of renewable forms of energy, and that's where ancillary policies like increasing Cafe standards come in handy.
The problem is, there's no way to tell how much a patchwork of such ancillary policies will decrease emissions in the absence of a mandate for specific reductions – a cap-and-trade programme. Such a policy is one of Obama's highest priorities, but is also almost certain to be the greatest domestic political challenge of his first term. And he needs to get it done well before that first term comes to an end.
Right now, one such bill (the so-called Waxman-Markey bill) is making its way through the House of Representatives, where it's already hit some significant bumps. And that's well before it reaches the Senate where it will be subject to a supermajority requirement and, therefore, the whims of dirty energy producers and soi disant centrists in both parties, who will either weaken it further or kill it entirely.
So yes. Today's news is welcome news. In fact, it's better than welcome news. It's a concrete sign that Obama plans to do something with his power to regulate carbon emissions. But it's a sideshow to the events in Congress, which, though promising in their own right, are also much less auspicious.