Better than Playing Gasoline Politics: A Crash Program in Fuel Efficiency

June 19, 2008 – Vol.13 No.13

BETTER THAN PLAYING GASOLINE POLITICS:
A CRASH PROGRAM IN FUEL EFFICIENCY.

President Bush wants to lift a 27-year-old ban on coastal oil drilling and open up a portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil exploration as ways to cut the cost of gasoline. New oil – if any – wouldn’t be available for years: It takes time to drill and recover oil. The notion behind lifting the ban is that the potential for new oil reserves would push global oil prices down. Yet there’s no guarantee that would happen, let alone how much.

Presidential candidate Senator John McCain, who may rapidly be losing his environmental credentials, agrees with the President. Obama has yet to comment.

The plan is a knee jerk reaction that looks only to November. Bush wants his party to stay in power: The price of gas is on track to be an election issue. A major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico this Summer or Fall may decide who moves into the White House in January.

The nation needs something bolder. Better than looking for more oil it needs a crash program to dramatically cut oil consumption while making equivalent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions attributed to vehicles. Most oil is used for vehicular fuel.

A crash program could have a nearly immediate effect on oil consumption as well as a long term steady reduction in oil use and associated global warming emissions.

Beginning immediately:

--- Offer a generous tax credit for the purchase of an energy efficient new or used vehicle that increases with average fuel economy. Use the national average for vehicular type as a baseline. The higher the gasoline fuel economy (or equivalent) the larger the credit. The credit would encourage the trade in of fuel guzzlers for something more efficient.

--- Loosen up the protectionist import rules for new and used vehicles. Make it easier to import high fuel economy cars and trucks that are already available overseas, many of which may already meet crash tests and possibly emissions tests as well. Brands not currently sold here would be allowed. US manufacturers could import vehicles they sell overseas, but not here, adding to the selection of cars and trucks they already offer. The additional vehicles would increase inventories on new car lots to meet the expected demand with the efficiency tax credit.

--- Offer corporations generous incentives to build high fuel economy cars domestically. Increase the incentive with the fuel economy of the vehicles built. Make sure that those incentives can be applied to startup companies such as Aptera or Tesla. The sagging economy needs a jobs program, particularly in manufacturing. The incentives, tax breaks or whatever, could keep some auto factories open and build new ones.

--- Increase domestic supplies of lithium and offer generous incentives to increase the domestic production of lithium batteries. The development of plug-in hybrids is supported by the domestic automakers. Plug-in hybrids are a near-term answer to dramatically increasing fuel economy. Pure-electric vehicles could do even better by eliminating gas and diesel altogether. Right now the preferred choice for batteries needed in plug-in cars and trucks are those using a variation of lithium electro-chemistries. But those batteries are costly. Increasing lithium supplies and production rates should reduce cost.

The Arctic sea ice is set for another year of record melting. Scientists in Australia and the US have found that the world’s oceans have warmed and risen at a rate 50 per cent faster in the last four decades of the 20th century than documented in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report. Global warming needs to be tackled.

The US is in an economic slump due in part to high gas prices. New jobs need to be created, existing ones preserved. Ultra high fuel economy vehicles, since it is now possible to build them, could be the next big thing and, domestically produced, could be an economy booster.

Vehicles more efficient than those currently sold in the US are already available on global markets. Some are small, but many the same size as vehicles sold here. Antiquated laws keep those efficient vehicles out of the hands of US drivers.

Drilling for oil in waters now banned might be more difficult than just changing a law. Wealthy land owners have blocked the building of offshore wind farms potentially in their view. They’d do the same with offshore oil rigs.

Links:

Tesla Motors
http://www.teslamotors.com

Aptera
http://www.aptera.com

--- Lithium Resources Ample for the Next Big Thing.

--- Lithium: The Pinnacle of Battery Technology?

--- Why Not A Power Purchase of Super Efficient Vehicles to Cut Gas Prices?

--- Skip The Gas Tax Holiday: Open U.S. Borders to Efficient Cars.