By Craig Rucker
The federal government's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, better known by its acronym CAFÉ, has morphed from "outlived its usefulness" to "counterproductive."
CAFÉ was enacted by Congress in 1975. It was Washington's response to several Arab oil embargoes that sent gasoline prices skyrocketing and created long lines at gas pumps across the nation. The top-down solution, according to big government politicos at the time, was to have Uncle Sam force automakers to increase the fuel efficiency standards of cars and trucks.
But like many bureaucratic efforts to supplant the free market, it had unintended consequences. CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen explains at CFACT.org:
For the first few years, improving gasoline mileage was relatively easy. But as the standards tightened, car makers had to make vehicles smaller and use less steel and more aluminum and plastic to achieve the arbitrary mileage demands. That poses a serious problem that the Trump Administration wants to fix.Bigger, heavier vehicles are safer, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has said for decades. Smaller, lighter vehicles are less crash-worthy, less safe. Drivers and passengers in cars and light trucks are many times more likely to die in a crash – and far more likely to be maimed, disfigured, disabled or paralyzed – beyond what would have occurred if the CAFÉ standards did not exist or had been relaxed.
CAFÉ has contributed to thousands of deaths. Its problems were exacerbated when the Obama Administration launched its war on energy and ratcheted up the mandates in an attempt to bring the requirement from 27.5 MPG to an unrealistic 54.5.
Driessen further explains that a National Academy of Sciences study showed there were 2,600 extra fatalities thanks to CAFÉ in 1993 alone - long before the even more unrealistic Obama standards were influencing car makers' safety decisions.
Markets are efficient. Government control is not.
President Obama's war on energy was a wrong-headed mistake. It's time to make the CAFÉ fuel standards broader and more realistic or, better yet, end them all together.
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