CAFE proposal: Bush leaves April Fool's Day trap

In March 2008, President George W Bush was snapped plugging an electric cord into a hybrid Ford SUV on the White House lawn. To the chagrin of many in the green car industry, the realities of his last few months in government have failed to follow through on the photo opportunities.

Bush (pictured) stepped down this month having refused to finalise new fuel efficiency laws mooted in last April's Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards proposal.

CAFE arose from an energy bill, signed by Bush in late 2007, mandating an average fuel efficiency of 35 miles per gallon for cars and trucks by 2020. The proposal details actuals for the bill covering the phase-in from 2011 to 2015. These aspects of the bill remain blank as he leaves the White House.

"That's a shame because the regulations were understood to be all but finalised and ready for White House sign-off more than a month ago," wrote Joe DeCicco, a senior fellow with the Environmental Defense Fund lobby group in hybridcars.com recently. "It would have at least given Bush a chance to burnish the 'light green' part of his legacy."

DeCicco and his compatriots interpret this as a last legislative swipe by the outgoing Administration, on behalf of Big Oil and The Big Old Car Corporation, at California's so-called Pavley standards, the driving force behind that state's ever-toughening Clean Car laws. The laws implement an ambitious plan to cut pollutants by 10 per cent by 2020 and boost investment in new energy technologies. The most comprehensive of their kind in the US, they're also designed to encourage similar legislation in other states.

The Department of Transportation's aim with the CAFE proposal was to shepherd auto makers through model years 2011-2015 on the way towards a 2020 target of 35 miles per gallon.  The Administration's stance, he writes, represents "another attempt to lend legal ammunition to automakers still hoping to derail California and other states' leadership on stronger steps to protect the climate."

Having been thwarted twice in its active legal attempts to stymie progress on this front, Bush and co have resorted to a kind of passive aggression, dumping the issue in the lap of the incoming Obama Administration -- doubtless knowing how stretched it is already.

The rationale for such inaction is that they can't afford to retool in these tough times. DeCicco dismisses this as bunkum, citing regular retooling as essential to their competitive survival. "Their current engineering budgets are now tight, but if an automaker fails to invest, it won't be able to stay in business. That is, after all, the rationale for the bridge loans just given to GM and Chrysler."

All that's required is a change of priorities, he says. That is, it's not a matter of investing more, but investing differently. Even if petrol prices stay low, "consumer interest in 'green' for its own sake, out of environmental concern, is also here to stay and bound to grow. The broad direction is set and a smart automaker will re-orient its product strategy accordingly while keeping to a budget based on what it can expect in terms of market share."

And the CAFE standards keep the playing field level by imposing the same demands for improvement on everyone.

Subject as it is to stipulations that car manufacturers receive a minimum 18 months' notice before new standards take effect, the original bill gives Obama's administration until April 1 to finalise the CAFE details.