Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood Makes Massive Exaggeration About Major Accomplishment
At the White House’s announcement of Charlotte, NC Mayor Anthony Foxx‘s nomination for Secretary of Transportation Monday afternoon, outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood massively exaggerated an already-major accomplishment, namely the Obama administration’s increase in fuel efficiency standards. While listing what he considers four of his department’s most important accomplishments, LaHood said “By 2025, every car and light truck in America will get 55 miles per gallon.”
“It didn’t take one vote of Congress,” LaHood continued, “it took a little bit of leadership here, and a little bit of leadership at EPA and DOT, and we made it happen. That will be part of President Obama’s legacy, and what a legacy: cleaning up the air in America, getting cleaner burning cars. That’s a big deal.”
LaHood only wound up naming two other accomplishments (combating distracted driving and high-speed rail), but if his description of the Obama administration’s CAFE standards is correct, that alone would be as impressive a legacy as going to the moon. In a Prius.
The problem is right there in the name, CAFE standards, which refers to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards; it’s an average fuel economy requirement for each car company’s entire fleet. Under President Obama’s direction, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has set that standard at 54.5 MPG by 2025, which includes 60 MPG for cars, and 50 MPG for light trucks. In order to achieve that average, some cars will be more fuel efficient than those standards, but many will be less.
In LaHood’s formulation, the 2025 target of 54.5 miles per gallon would be the minimum standard, not the average. That would mean even ginormous overcompensationmobiles would need to get 54.5 mpg, with or without truck nuts. Still, even the average standard they have achieved is pretty impressive.
President Obama also mentioned the CAFE standards during his State of the Union Address, but he did so much more artfully. With a skillful mixing of tenses, the President said (emphasis mine) “We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas,” which sounds like cars are already twice as efficient, but which actually means they will be twice as efficient in 2025 as they were when he took office, because of the regulations they already passed.
There are a whole mess of qualifiers to those CAFE standards, including the fact that, for some reason, a CAFE standard of 61 mpg only requires a car to have a 43 mpg window sticker from the EPA, but however you slice it, President Obama has doubled them. A Republican president would have mandated coal-burning cars and baby seal tires by now (I’m kidding! The cars would burn baby seals, too).
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
