The Emission Standards Of Right-Wing Gasbaggery

Brandon Friedman of VotVets has an excellent diary up about Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck twitching and wailing about Obama's fuel economy plan:

And that's why, in the next five years, we're seeking to raise fuel-economy standards to an industry average of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016, an increase of more than eight miles per gallon per vehicle. That's an unprecedented change, exceeding the demands of Congress and meeting the most stringent requirements sought by many of the environmental advocates represented here today.

As a result, we will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years. Just to give you a sense of magnitude, that's more oil than we imported last year from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Libya, and Nigeria combined.

Friedman points out that this would prevent us from having such a dependance on foreign oil. But there's another side to Malkin's reactionary whining.

She thinks that CAFE standards are going to be the root cause for killing people:

Totally missing from today’s discussion of imposing stricter mileage standards: the potentially lethal impact. For years, free-market analysts and government statisticians have warned of the deadly effect of increasing corporate auto fuel economy standards.

Malkin uses a piece by Sam Kazman from the CEI ( also printed on the rabidly right-wing conservative website NRO ) where he states that:

CAFE has this impact on safety because it restricts the production of large cars. Large cars are less fuel efficient than smaller, similarly equipped vehicles, but they are also more crashworthy in practically every type of accident.

Sam and, by extention, Malkin are rooting their thesis under the guise that Obama's CAFE progam would eliminate production of larger vehicles and vehicles that don't meet crash-test standards. This is patently false.

The White House has the complete 6 page pdf up of H.R. 6. I'm sure that Malkin, Beck, and all right-wing prattle heads would have been exhausted after having read it. The funny thing is, it doesn't say anything about elimating safety standards or excluding "large vehicles" from the program.

The Administration has several goals: increased fuel economy, safety, sound economics, and protection of consumer choice.

See what happens when you learn how to read.

Fuel Economy Will Destroy Us All

What do you get when you put Mitt Romney, Sean Hannity, and William Kristol in a room with fresh talking-poinst about regulation, fuel economy, and the "Big 3" auto manufacturers?



So, then, explain how foreign car manufacturers can flourish.
Yeah, that's right Sean, I brought out the "other-countries-can-do-it-so-why-can't-we" bit.

Also, considering that European auto makers follow standards much stricter than CAFE her in America and still beat the "Big 3" hand-over-fist, it isn't hard to see that Hannity, Kristol, and Mitt's logic doesn't hold up.

The technology exists. However, people like Mitt, Hannity, and Kristol have so much of their vocabulary - so much of their lives - invested into the "regulation is bad" speech that they fear becoming irrelavent within their own clique if they stray from the script. They will deny logic at every turn, so long as they have grocery money at the end of the week.

I was expecting Sean to start claiming that gays were to blame for this as well.

Movies That Make You Think : V2.0

Take everything that you've heard about fuel efficiency in cars, how automotive manufacturers are workng on cars running off alternative fuels, the cost of oil, the cost of research and developing these vehicles of the future, of government, and of how we get our information - then watch this:

Who Killed The Electric Car