Meeting W. at the CAFE

Gregg Easterbrook, writing in Slate points out something that jaded advocates of energy reform may have overlooked from the SOTU, which is that while Bush offerred mere rhetoric (the famous "addicted to foreign oil") in last year's SOTU, this time around W. is actually putting at least the first steps towards genuine energy conservation on the table.

Last Tuesday, Bush proposed that the CAFE standard grow 4 percent stricter per year. Essentially, this would mean that each new model year would need to get one mpg better gas mileage than cars from the year before. The last time the federal fuel-economy standard was strengthened was 1988. Nineteen years with zero progress on mpg is the leading reason U.S. petroleum consumption continues to rise.

Easterbrook wonders why Bush's proposal has met with a collective yawns from the mainstream press. Easterbrook then riffs on one of his pet themes during the Bush administration, which is that W. is not nearly the environmental despoiler he is made out to be. This happens to be one of the few areas where Easterbook, a incisive and contrarian thinker has repeatedly fallen flat. Perhaps Bush's critics demagogued a bit on mercury standards, but it strains credulity that an administration that repeatedly let industry draft environmental legislation, packed the EPA and Interior with corporate hacks and denied the existence of climate change for 6 years was anything other than a disaster for the environment.

Still, Easterbrook has a point - for the first time Bush seems to be putting something real on the table. Unlike the majority of Bush's SOTU initiatives (e.g. his tax cut for personal health insurance masquerading as health care reform), the CAFE proposal provides the Dems with a dilemma in that it is a genuinely sound public policy. Ignore Bush's offer, and they are complicit in maintaining the disastrous energy policy that 12 years of GOP/Big Oil control of Congress has wrought. Take Bush seriously (despite his utter lack of credibility on this front) and pass his proposal and you provide him with a genuine bipartisan accomplishment.

So what should the Dems do? Take him up on the offer. Unlike health care reform, energy reform can be done just as effectively in stages and every bit helps. Rather than waiting on a "comprehensive" energy reform bill that gives the GOP minority and Bush a chance to throw issues like ANWR drilling or ethanol subsidies into the mix, they should fast-track a CAFE standards bill modeled on Bush's proposal and put it on his desk to force him to pack his rhetoric with action. Either he signs it and everybody wins, or he vetoes it and gives Hilary, Obama or whoever is the Dem candidate in 2008 one more issue to attack the GOP's vulnerability on energy and the environment.

ON SECOND THOUGHT:


As Kevin Drum points out, on actual inspection Bush's CAFE plan has some serious flaws, with obvious loopholes written into the program. (It proves that my environmental wonk skills have grown rusty from years of disuse.) Anyway, strike the part about modeling the program after Bush's proposal - but the Dems should still fast-track a CAFE standards bill with teeth. Of course, the environmental policy wonk in me notes that a gas tax would be a far more efficient way of achieving the same goal of reducing fuel efficiency, but living in a nation where cheap gas is considered a constitutional right, that's not going to happen any time soon.