Obama Comes Through On Auto Emissions

       Obama: "The days of Washington dragging its heels
      are over ... (photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Looks like we picked the right guy.

President Barack Obama is already delivering on promises to change this country's approach to climate change -- which heretofore has been largely to ignore it.

We've lost a critical decade to those who'd rather see sea levels rise and coastal civilizations destroyed than stop making profits from selling fossil fuels to burn into the great garbage can in the sky.

They bought the government, rather than investing in the next energy economy.

Today, Obama signed an executive order telling his EPA Administrator to move toward allowing California and twelve other states to set limits on vehicular greenhouse gas emissions. California has customarily been allowed to lead in auto emissions policy, because its clean air rules pre-date the federal Clean Air Act.

Already, flacks for the auto manufacturers have hit the airwaves -- along with Republican members of Congress such as the oil state Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, who equates global warming with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster -- to decry the new rules as a mortal threat to the automakers, which are already reaching into our pockets for bailouts.

But the auto manufacturers have been making this same argument for decades: it's just too expensive to re-tool to make more efficient automobiles.

Well, the events of the last year have put the lie to that. When gas prices skyrocketed to nearly $5 per gallon, people stopped buying big, dumb American SUVs -- and started buying little Japanese coupes and hybrids, just as they did in the 1970s.

And the American automakers, which spent thirty years convincing their workers that increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards would cause layoffs, laid off workers by the tens of thousands because Americans were buying high fuel economy cars, rather than the Cadillac Escalation -- and Hummers were going up on blocks in driveways across America.

The fact is that, partly because of the Bush Administration's approach to regulating fuel economy, which gave SUVs the same exemptions that pickup trucks had, the American fleet not only grew as inefficient as it had been since the 1980s, the automakers began to rely on selling the big, dumb SUVs, which yielded a wider profit margin than ordinary passenger vehicles. Even though the SUVs were mostly being used as glorified station wagons.

And today, the car companies' shills are back out on the news shows, making the same exact argument they've made for decades -- that higher fuel economy means littler, less powerful cars.

They of so little imagination, they'd rather legislate than innovate -- and so instead of hiring engineers to invent the powerful electric/hybrid/fuel cell, they'll spend their money to hire lawyers to try to continue to block the new fuel economy standards, as they have successfully done since 2002.

The funny part is that, now that we've spent 30 billion dollars to bail out GM and Chrysler, the US auto industry insists that we allow them to continue to manufacture, indefinitely, a product that relies on oceans of oil that simply will not exist infinitely -- and that, so long as they do, will require military intervention to keep them flowing from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria to U.S. consumers -- who will then have to offer up not only our tax dollars, but the lives of our daughters and sons, to keep them flowing.

That's not exactly a fair deal for the rest of us.

From what I recall, he who pays the bills makes the rules.

For now, Ford, Chrysler, and GM's approach to the global warming crisis that their products, used correctly, have created, is -- if you'll pardon the expression -- "No, we can't."

But the climate catastrophe we thought would unfold in Grandchildren's time is upon us today.

We can no longer afford to put off action.

I just finished reading and analyzing Obama's inaugural address, to discuss with my students tomorrow.

Here's a key passage:

We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality ... and lower its costs.

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

Obama's already begun, in a big way, to live up to his rhetoric.

Now the rest of us must do our part.