Obamas MPG rule change

[billcoe]

Bout Friggan time!!! Doing the right thing for the country is never a bad thing. I was flipping though some radio channels yesterday and caught some right winger suggesting that Obama is full of patoutie for this act. I say bullshit. This should have been done a long time ago if nothing else so we can stop kissing Arab (and now Hugo Chavez) asses.

 

save some of that cheap stuff for our children and the next war. Obama nailed this one.

 

http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=78810

[jmo]

The timing is horrible. The auto industry is on government life support and now he's trying to make it twice as hard on them. It will have much farther reaching consequences than Obama can imagine.

 

 

 

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008674720_enviro27.html

[PhöQ]

The timing is horrible. The auto industry is on government life support and now he's trying to make it twice as hard on them. It will have much farther reaching consequences than Obama can imagine.

 

 

 

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008674720_enviro27.html

 

The timing is perfect actually, this might effectively weed out the old guard hangers on and jumpstart a new era.

[Dechristo]

He could mandate that illegal aliens be harnessed to rickshaws.

[Bug]

The timing is horrible. The auto industry is on government life support and now he's trying to make it twice as hard on them. It will have much farther reaching consequences than Obama can imagine.

 

 

 

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008674720_enviro27.html

 

The timing is perfect actually, this might effectively weed out the old guard hangers on and jumpstart a new era.

Detroit has been pretending to not get it for long enough.

If I can take a 14 mpg 1960 Ford , put a slightly larger engine, a manual transmission and and taller tires - All in my back yard - and get 27mpg, why the fk can't Detroit?

It's bullshit.

They deserve to go down.

Stupidity should not be rewarded.

[billcoe]

The timing is horrible. The auto industry is on government life support and now he's trying to make it twice as hard on them. It will have much farther reaching consequences than Obama can imagine.

 

The problem I have with not doing it is that very few are interested in totaling up the actual costs of not changing. They are hidden and they are huge. Right wingers think that they should be able to continue to squander this valuable resource and that supply and demand rule it, but they essentially get Gobment subsidized pricing. Does anyone think that it is a co-incidence that the very first western project in Afghanistan after we had power played regime change and tossed out the Taliban was a huge Chevron consortium pipeline that the Taliban (when they were in power) had rejected?

http://www.thedebate.org/thedebate/afghanistan.asp

 

This is a start --- http://costofwar.com/

 

Condoliza Rice, Secretary of State at the time of the invasion was a former Chevron Board member. She took George Schultz's seat on the Chevron board (he was former Sec. of State under Ronald Reagan). Chevron loved her so much they had named a tanker after her when she was just the national security adviser.

 

This kind of thing goes on all the time, our country spending money to power play a private companies move. In this instance we wind up subsidizeing people with Suburbans and your Expeditions (or all of us for that matter) and various other petroleum squandering habits. These people seem to ignore the blood, too much of it our American sons and daughters, which was spilled to achieve this. We just saw this kind of government move in Asscrackistan and Iraq. You hear people like Rush Limbaugh decrying government assistance to various poor and immigrants and yet they don't say a peeping thing about this massive and stupid subsidy THEY are continually the recipients of. The Chinese are financing this today and our children will be both paying for it and the recipients of these investments.

 

I'm not argueing that our countries resources and treasure shouldn't be spent cranking foreign markets for commercial power plays, but I feel that it's a damned expensive hidden cost that we don't see at the pump and could be somewhat avoided if we had to pay full price at the pump. Tabulate the price of the Iraq war in there and see what that adds up to as I can't because my calculator doesn't go that far out. It stops in the billions and can't conceive of anything higher I suppose. It reminds me of the old sarcastic Everette Dirkson (former senator) saw that went something like this: "A Billion Dollars here.....a Billion Dollars there, pretty soon it adds up to real money." A quick perusal of info on the net will demo to you that war was clearly a war of petroleum liberation, you'll find that Dick Cheney has links to Chevron as well as Bechtel.

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=i5cpBcUVeJoC&pg=PA260&lpg=PA260&dq=george+schultz+chevron&source=bl&ots=ohL52rAODt&sig=W4MP7wDLyTsgWQfdqUVBiwpDasw&hl=en&ei=pBEcStyFA5qytAP8jJTdCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3

 

We have a massive infrastructure in place overseas to enable these kinds of things without going to war. These various foreign service folks do huge yeomans work day in and day out, no doubt, we all owe these invisible patriots a huge collective thank you. Talkin about CIA, foreign service, diplomats, commercial agents attached to Gov't etc etc serving in rowdy rat holes like Nigeria and Balukistan for instance....but these costs throughout the world add up too. Conservation should be on the top of the pile of things we as a country should value, not squandering as has been the case for the last 20 years or more.

 

Oh yeah, revised MPG rules were long long overdue. Our kids and their kids will be the big beneficiaries. Thanks Barak.

 

regards to all my brothers and countrymen

 

[tvashtarkatena]

The timing is horrible. The auto industry is on government life support and now he's trying to make it twice as hard on them. It will have much farther reaching consequences than Obama can imagine.

 

 

 

 

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008674720_enviro27.html

 

"The timing is horrible" is the tired excuse that got the auto companies into the mess they're in. #1 cause of their current financial woes? No one wants to buy their prehistoric crap anymore, and, magically, other car companies have more than enough modern offerings to fill the need. Besides, the health of the planet's just a weency bit more important than GM's bottom line...or survival for that matter. Frankly, if I never see another GM POS on the road that would be just fine. They suck.

 

It's not just about time, it's too late, but better late than never.

Edited May 26, 2009 by tvashtarkatena

[JayB]

Anyone have numbers for C02 emissions for passenger mile for trains, busses, trams (including construction/build-outs) vs autos?

 

How about numbers for efficiency trends (which mode is getting more efficient most rapidly relative to others) and replacement rates?

 

Seems like incremental gains in passenger-mile efficiency could easily dwarf those obtained by mass transit, since the vast majority of all travel here is via auto. Also think that the fleet of autos turns over much more rapidly, so efficiencies become incorporated into this mode much more quickly than in busses, trains, etc.

 

Per the GM/Chrysler issue - the essential problem has always been that ever since there's been anything like real competition in the marketplace, they've had a difficult time persuading consumers to buy their output at prices that cover the cost of producing them. The new MPG standards are only going to put GM et al further behind. Count on sqaundering scores of billions of dollars on enterprises that ultimately go the way of British Leyland. I suspect that it'd be cheaper to shutter all of the factories and give all existing UAW members salaries for life, and would make the underlying economic realities much more clear.

[pink]

COLD AIR INTAKE..... a wise investment, just sayin.