Hooray for Samuel Skinner!
There are a lot of good reasons for squeezing more miles of travel out of every gallon of gasoline burned in automobile engines. On the most mundane level, boosting mileage will save people money. On a near-cosmic level, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere as a byproduct of gasoline combustion helps lessen or postpone the unhappy consequences that are threatened by a global warming trend. In between are various other economic and political benefits, among them that the less foreign oil Americans buy they less the trade deficit will grow. For all these reasons the proposal from Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner to restore the new car fuel-economy standard is more than welcome.
It’s welcome not least because there’s a lot of lost time to make up for, thanks to the waivers the Reagan Administration granted on the fuel standard. The Reagan White House embraced the dogma that the marketplace alone should tell auto companies what kind of mileage their cars ought to get. The market can be a highly efficient mechanism for satisfying public wants, but where public health and welfare are at issue--where such things as the safety of food and medicines or the protection of the environment are concerned--regulation plays a vital role. Under Reagan, fuel economy standards were allowed to slip from the 27.5 miles per gallon called for in 1985 back to 26 m.p.g. Now they’re up to 26.5, but Skinner wants 27.5 m.p.g. on 1990 models. The thing to watch is whether President Bush, who as a loyal member of the Reagan Administration once favored abolishing the 1975 fuel standards law, will back him up.
Chrysler Corp. wouldn’t have any trouble meeting such a requirement, but General Motors and Ford are already singing the blues. The lyrics are familiar; the Big Two say the big, less fuel-efficient cars they make are what the public wants. It’s true that, since oil prices began falling early in this decade, demand for most American-built smaller cars has declined. It’s also true that demand for fuel-efficient Japanese cars, either imported or built in U.S. factories, has steadily increased, to the point where nearly one out of every four cars bought by Americans carries a Japanese marque. There are various reasons for the success of the Japanese models; it’s absurd to pretend that an interest in good mileage isn’t one of them.
A 27.5 m.p.g. standard, though, should be seen as only a beginning. Federal technical studies project that just by using such technologies as multivalve engines and what are called continuously variable transmissions, cars can get 33-35 m.p.g. by the mid-1990s. The important point is that those technologies exist. They are already used on a lot of Japanese cars. There’s no reason why American car makers can’t adopt them as well.
There’s something ridiculous as well as insulting about auto companies defending their profitable interest in making bigger and less fuel-efficient cars on the ground that they are only giving the public what it demands, when for the last eight years those same companies lobbied to restrict imports of Japanese cars and so deny consumers what they wanted. Choice, in any event, threatens to become an increasingly unaffordable luxury in a world confronted by global warming. That trend, the “greenhouse effect,” stems from a concentration of carbon gasses in the atmosphere that trap the Earth’s radiated heat. In the face of the risk this phenomenon presents to weather patterns, crops and--if melting ice caps raise ocean levels--to coastal communities, the prudent course is to cut carbon dioxide discharges as much as possible wherever possible. Tougher mileage standards for automobile engines are one place to start.
