President Obama Puts Pedal to the Metal on New Environmental Standards for Cars

For a long time as mileage increased, the number of miles driven also increased. Thus this will have no net effect on emissions.
What it will do is result in far more fatalities because the cars will be so small.
So cars will cost more, emissions will not be reduced and more people will die.
Obama strikes again.

Automakers embraced the rules they have been fighting for decades because they want uniformity, the president said. With the Department of Transportation pushing fuel efficiency standards, the EPA pushing greenhouse gas emission standards, and 14 states seeking their own regulations, automakers embraced the notion of one standard.
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This just doesn’t make any sense, and I wish the press would have had a chance to ask the automakers questions.
As long as President Obama just chose the highest standard being pushed at the time- California’s- he didn’t give the automakers any relief. They would have just built their cars to CA’s standards.
Furthermore, there’s nothing to stop the next Governor of CA from deciding this standard isn’t high enough, and raising standards again. There’s nothing stopping any state from pushing for higher standards.
I just don’t buy this ‘uniformity’ line, because nothing President Obama did can guarantee that.

If Obama is talking hybrids, you will not recoup your money in 3 years. I drive a hybrid and it cost me not hundreds more but thousands more; furthermore, not only is the base price much more expensive, but the maintenance costs are more as well..Some are going to find it difficult to afford these new standards.

Is Arnold looking for a job working for the Democrats after he is through playing governator of California?

drjohn,
Where in the Constitution does it say he can not set CAFE standards?

I want to see Auhnold driving a clown car.
Can I make a suggestion, every member of Congress cannot drive or ride in a car that gets less than the mandated CAFE rules, just to be fair.
They can build clown cars, but I bet they won’t sell clown cars.

“Where in the Constitution does it say he can not set CAFE standards?”
Uh, Jim, the Constitution delineates the powers of the office of the President.
Did you miss that class?
The President cannot make law.
It’s called separation of powers. Of course, hardly anyone in the media has noticed that Obama has little regard for the Constitution.
Obama is now determining Chrysler’s advertising budget. That’s not kosher either.

Oh, and Ryan, I had no idea Jacoby said that. I got it from the CATO institute.
“The same goes for automobile fuel efficiency. Environmentalists argue that increasing the miles per gallon of the cars we drive would save more energy than increased drilling could produce. But the data show that fuel consumption goes up whenever automobile fuel efficiency goes up. Nearly all the gains in fuel efficiency disappear once we account for the demonstrable increases in driving that such investments produce.”
4/24/2001

drjohn”The President cannot make law.
It’s called separation of powers. Of course, hardly anyone in the media has noticed that Obama has little regard for the Constitution.”
If you think there is a constitutional problem here, with the President exercising the power Constitutionally granted him by the 2007 law that passed with almost 70% of Congresses vote that was signed by President Bush, then bring a court case. Or just keep whining and looking ignorant on the Internet.

Posted by: jhw539 | May 19, 2009 7:45:42 PM
What on Earth are you talking about?
At least Bush had the decency to respect the Constitution and actually bothered with the legislative process.
Obama apparently doesn’t need that.

Change has come to America.

jhw539…Actually my particular hybrid, suv, was rated number one and it cost exactly 3500. more than the standard gas model…as far as maintenance go, yes it is indeed more expensive if your smart and value your safety or the safety of your mechanic you can’t take your hybrid to your local mechanic, or yourself, to be worked on..You have to have a mechanic who is trained and certified to work on hybrids as they have an electrical system that can cause an unexperienced person to be electrocuted….Look it up…They are more expensive to own than the standard gas model…and telling people otherwise is just not true….

“see. So the sociological factors which were “ignored” don’t change the accuracy of the assertion.”
Its like asserting that more people voted for Obama for President than at any other point in American history.
Its a meaningless stat given our population increases.
“You’re just having another hissy fit because you don’t like it.”
ROFLMAO!
This from the same right winger who has his daily fake outrage at Obama no matter what the issue or its significance.

I referred to the law passed in 2007 that did indeed give the executive branch to take this action.
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The law passed by Congress and signed by Bush gave a date of 2020. That doesn’t give the executive branch authority to change the date.

The typical civic and hybrid civic are not that far apart in mileage yet the hybrid cost a bunch more. If you add up all the claptrap devices that makeup a hybrid, the mining of the components for the nickel cadium battery-the shipping of that material to Japan for processing – then back here for use makes no sense-at least to me.
Anyone who believes that automobiles haven’t improved should have driven on made in the 60′s and 70′s, all of 12 or 13 mpg and when a tank of gas was often accompanied by a couple quarts of oil. Todays cars are more reliable, safer and very efficient no matter whose car you buy.
Yes, Obama will lean on car makers to improve mileage, we’ll say wow, 40 mpg , yet gasoline will cost us double of what it does now becasue soon taxes on gasoline will go up and out of sight and since he won’t drill for our own we’ll still be dependent on foriegn oil.

Anyone who wants a car that gets 40 mpg can go out and buy one today. Problem is, very few people want them, which is why they don’t sell.
But when the government wants you to buy something you don’t want, and makes it hard for you to buy something you do, it’s really in its comfort zone. That’s what governments are really good at.

Gee what a shock fascist hyena does some selective editing.
From the same article.
But Obama had his fans at Antonio’s.
Dobbs’ father, Randy, quietly nursed a beer as he listened to his son lamenting Obama’s “flip-flopping.”
“Politicians are slippery,” he conceded. “We agree on that.” But he said he is more patient about the promises Obama made to Elkhart. “He’s sure trying to fix the economy,” he said. “He’s tackling a lot of problems at once.”
“I was impressed,” Linda Rothrock said of the Notre Dame speech. She was not put off by the notion that the president got as close as South Bend, but this time, did not have Elkhart on his agenda.
“I think it’s great. The whole idea that he has been here at all,” she said. “Normally, a U.S. president goes to Indianapolis, at best.”

@ Ryan C,
(I’m posting this here in case you do not check our conversation from earlier this afternoon. You’ll recognized the analysis)
Sorry for delay in getting back to you. I must admit, you are getting better in your analysis, but you are not quite there. Let’s continue using your example (for simplicity, we’ll disregard any increases in federal and state fuel charges) to further the analysis.
Car A gets 30 mpg. Car B gets 40 mpg.
Both drive 15,000 miles in a year.
Assume $2 per gallon of gas.
Car A uses 500 gallons to get to 15K.
Car B uses 375 gallons to get to 15K
Car B would see a fuel savings of $250 over the course of the year.
Now, let’s dig little deeper as we have not yet included investment costs (i.e., additional costs per vehicle to improve efficiency/reduce emissions). I’ve seen various estimates from $600 – $2,000. Let’s assume $1,300 from article I saw on BBC site.
So, to recoup additional costs ($1,300) @ 15,000 miles per year, the payback period would be 5.2 years. But, I could instead place this $1,300 in a long-term CD earning 2.1% (B of A website). Therefore, the discounted cost is $1,448 which yields a break-even of 5.8 years.
But, we’re not quite done. The EPA uses an assumption of 12,000 miles driven per year in its estimates. So, at 12,000 miles driven per year, annual savings of Car B is $200/year. Again, using a discount rate of 2.1% (5 year CD rate), the discounted additional cost is $1,488 (same as before) which yields a break-even of 7.4 years. This would not appear to be a good investment from my point of view, particularly since I only drive ~8,000 miles per year (breakeven approaches 12 years)
To this point, the analysis does not include any increases in taxes (you know it’s coming, afterall, this is the Obama administration). To be fair, as gas prices rise, Car B becomes more attractive. At $3/gal. the breakeven is 4.7 years and at $4/gal. the breakeven is 3.5 years (but in my case at 8,000 miles driven per year my breakeven would be 5.4 years, certainly not a slam-dunk decision).
So, it would come as no surprise that liberals might actually prefer higher gas prices as these higher prices further their cause (“”I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment (in gas prices)” Barack Obama, June 2008).
So there you go. Enjoy it, Champ!
tjp612
a.k.a. “self described expert in macroeconomics” (per Ryan C)

George W. Bush saved 1.1 million lives in Africa. Let’s look in on what Mr. Obama is doing:
“Key pledges to boost money for Aids funds, education programmes and poverty-reduction schemes have all been missed, the Global Aids Alliance (GAA) said.
“The Washington-based organisation said that figures from Mr Obama’s May 7 budget request to the US Congress set the administration on a path to breaking its campaign promises to the people of Africa.
“A pledge to spend £4.3 billion on bilateral Aids programmes under the Mr Obama’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) has been shaved back to £3.3 billion.
“Mr Obama had also promised to contribute about £1.8 billion on the Global Fund to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, but his budget request fell short by £1.2 billion, the GAA said.
“It calculated that this meant that one million people will not receive treatment for HIV, and 2.9 million women will miss out on services to help prevent passing the virus to their unborn children.”
What the heck–those people don’t vote. The utter shamelessness of this man…

from the WaPo
“If you liked what credit default swaps did to our economy, you’re going to love cap-and-trade. Just read Title VIII of the bill, which lets investment banks, hedge funds and other speculators participate in the cap-and-trade market. They don’t have emissions to cut; they have commissions to make. ”
Any useful idiot want to rationalize this?

Posted by: jhw539 | May 19, 2009 7:58:50 PM
Specifically, which law?
Bush excluded CO2 from the list regulated by the Clean Air Act.
This is getting amusing. Plants need CO2 and you exhaust CO2. Maybe you could stop emitting so much CO2 as a contribution.
How much of the world’s CO2 does man contribute? If the US stopped making producing CO2 (other than you and farm animals) today how much less CO2 would be contributed by man?

The Clean Air act refers to those “stationary” things that emit mroe than 250 tons of CO2 per year.
Things like schools, hospitals, churches, bakeries, farms and homes.
Never mind that the Earth has been cooling for ten years and temperatures went down while C02 levels went up in the past.
Just think- the EPA could regulate how many children you have, since humans emit a pollutant. The EPA could regulate your activity, since exercise results in higher levels of C02 emission.
The EPA could regulate what you eat. It could ban your outdoor grill.
It could ban the production of bread, since that liberates C02. Think of that-making bread pollutes the atmosphere. We need to ban yeast!
It could ban fireplaces in homes.
It could ban biofuels, since it produces more C02 than normal vehicles.
Light bulbs create C02, computers produce C02. So do gas hot water heaters.
Jets could be grounded.
Those liberals really have this well thought out.
And then there’s this:
“On Feb. 17, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson announced that the agency would reconsider a Bush Administration decision not to regulate CO2 emissions from new coal power plants.”

And one more thing. If you think any of this C02 talk is about saving the environment, you’re a fool.
It’s all about taxes.
And one MORE thing. The Supreme Court made a colossally STUPID decision in arguing that someone has to prove that C02 is NOT a pollutant.
The insistence on proving a negative is an idiot argument.
Plants NEED this pollutant. Without this pollutant, life on Earth would vanish.
That’s a pollutant?

What has percentag of the population got to do with the price of eggs? We produce 25% of the World’s GDP. How is that possible? It takes energy. Tax energy, lower GDP. It’s not that difficult even for Harvard grads. there is something else afoot, like massive transfer of wealth.

“This is getting amusing. Plants need CO2 and you exhaust CO2. Maybe you could stop emitting so much CO2 as a contribution.
How much of the world’s CO2 does man contribute?”
Human activity since the industrial revolution has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to increased radiative forcing from CO2, methane, tropospheric ozone, CFCs and nitrous oxide. The concentrations of CO2 and methane have increased by 36% and 148% respectively since the mid-1700s
But CO2 cannot be a pollutant because plants breathe it in and we breathe it out, right?
Yet another part of the right wing’s vanguard of scientific discussion along with global warming being a hoax because its cold outside.