Fuel Efficiency Standards for New Trucks—Can’t We Decide These for Ourselves?

Rather than wait on the market to demand more fuel efficient trucks, President Obama, bypassing Congress, has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to draw up a new round of regulations raising the fuel efficiency standards on heavy‐​duty trucks. He promises that this will save billions of dollars in fuel costs, lower prices and reduce greenhouse gas emissions—or, as he describes it, a “win‐​win‐​win” situation.


Thank you, Mr. President for taking such good care of us.


Apparently, we are too stupid to have realized the manifold benefits of this chain of events ourselves.


Or is it that we realize these actions will have no impact of climate change and will probably result in higher prices for new trucks and everything that they transport?


You can use our “Handy‐​Dandy Temperature Change Calculator” to see that, using the EPA’s own computer model, if Americans cut all of our carbon dioxide emissions to zero, today, the amount of warming that would be prevented (assuming a warming forecast that is itself probably too high) by 2100 is around two‐​tenths of a degree—an amount that would be virtually impossible to measure against natural climate variability. Increasing the fuel efficiency of heavy trucks would have considerably less of an effect than cutting all carbon dioxide emissions and would simply not be discernible in climate data.


And the President’s claim that increasing the fuel efficiency will lower the price of all things neglects the fact that we simply do not know what technology would accomplish this end.


Perhaps he should have said—“if you like your truck, you can keep your truck,” that is, until you have to replace it with something that will cost much more than you would have otherwise purchased and not do what it is supposed to do.


Again, thank you, Mr. President.