May 21, 2009
Running on empty
Dennis Kneale, CNBC's Media & Technology Editor, speaks truth to power about Pres. Obama's plans for the automotive industry: They stink.
[L]et me point out some fatal flaws in this green decree:
It will result in Americans driving more not less. When we get better mileage, we drive more than usual, negating much of the savings, says Penn State’s Andrew N. Kleit, who has written widely on the topic. The key to better mileage is lighter-weight cars — in which people die more often in traffic accidents. Since CAFE passed in 1975, smaller cars have killed almost 50,000 more people than otherwise would have died on the roads, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported in 2002. CAFE kills up to 3,900 extra people each year, a study by Harvard and the Brookings Institition states. It finds that for every 100 pounds less that an auto weighs, up to 780 more people die in traffic accidents in a year. It will add $600 to the price of a car, further worsening the Big 3’s already sizable cost disadvantage. Toyota, Honda and Hyundai already pretty much meet the stricter standards. It will force Detroit to build wimpy li’l cars most consumers don’t want to buy. CAFE rules long have distorted industry production. Automakers churn out loss-leader subcompacts purely to lower the average mileage for their entire fleet, freeing them to make higher-profit SUVs. At Ford, the F-150 truck provided 120% of profits, back when it had profits. I know, guys: We gotta fix this fuel problem sooner rather than later, we have to end our reliance on foreign oil. Blah blah blah. Sure we do — but not by Presidential fiat, not by way of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. We need a free-market solution: Make better, cheaper, safer lower-fuel cars that we want to buy, and we’re happy to start driving them.
Not because Bam said we should, but because we choose to do so.
Kneale makes some good points about the heavy-handed interference in the free market -- letting consumers (that's you and me) determine what we do and don't want to drive.
But what grabs me is something I mentioned in the previous post: the death toll associated with this government-mandated drive to make cars more fuel efficient, by also making them less safe. Allow me to repeat Kneale's recitation of the bloody statistics:
The key to better mileage is lighter-weight cars — in which people die more often in traffic accidents. Since CAFE passed in 1975, smaller cars have killed almost 50,000 more people than otherwise would have died on the roads, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported in 2002. CAFE kills up to 3,900 extra people each year, a study by Harvard and the Brookings Institition states. It finds that for every 100 pounds less that an auto weighs, up to 780 more people die in traffic accidents in a year.
That's a helluva death toll, a lot of Americans -- many presumably children -- sacrificed on the alter of eco-extremism and hatred of free markets and individual choice.
We live in a risk-averse society where helmets are mandated for cyclists; warning labels are printed on everything; trans-fats are banned from foods; and we are constantly reminded that sacrifices must be made "for the children."
Yet, irony of ironies, Pres. Obama and the moonbat environmental movement demand -- insist -- with all the power of the federal government to coerce compliance with their diktat that we shoehorn ourselves into cars that are by design less safe than the ones we want to drive.
All the while, they cruise around in their bulletproof limos and SUVs, posh luxury cars and high-end gas-guzzlers, too good to put their own families into the rolling coffins they foist on the plebs.
Almost 50,000 people have died as a result of the CAFE standards, nearly as many died in the Vietnam War, more than ten times as have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Where are the howls of protest? Where are the sign-waving demonstrators, the Code Pink screeching harpies demanding that we do something -- anything! -- to halt the carnage on the highways?
Programs like this expose the truth about all the so-called government-mandated safety standards and consumer protection agencies: They don't give a damn about us or our safety.
They exist to find new ways to restrict our freedom, allow greater governmental intrusion into our lives -- and ever increasing control by bureaucrats and pettifogging politicians.
Happy trails.
Posted by Mike Lief at May 21, 2009 11:23 PM
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Comments
I think you've got an open bold tag at the end of your blockquote.
Posted by: BlogDog at May 22, 2009 05:57 AM
Thanks; fixed.
Posted by: Mike Lief at May 22, 2009 07:06 AM