Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
April 24, 2000, Monday, Final Edition
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A25
LENGTH: 689 words
HEADLINE:
Pumps and Pocketbooks
BYLINE: Pietro Nivola
BODY:
One good way to reduce this country's
emissions of carbon dioxide as well as our dependence on foreign oil, suggests
an April 17 editorial ["Saving Gas, and the Planet"] is to set tougher
standards for the fuel efficiency of motor
vehicles.
Sorry, but Congress has entertained this notion for almost a
quarter-century with disappointing results. Since 1978 the United States has
been attempting to do what no other industrial country has tried: reduce the
consumption of oil just by imposing regulations--fuel-economy requirements--on
new fleets of automobiles. At least two difficulties bedevil this
command-and-control approach to energy conservation.
For one, the policy
reaches only new vehicles. This means that it takes decades, not just a year or
two, to raise the efficiency of the on-road fleet. If, tomorrow morning, federal
regulators were to ratchet up the standards for SUVs, minivans and light trucks,
most of the existing ones would remain in use, guzzling fuel and spewing
greenhouse gases for years to come.
Worse, though the vehicular fleet
gradually can be forced to record better gas mileage, doing so scarcely
dissuades motorists from driving the "improved" vehicles more than ever. The
unrelenting increase in vehicle miles traveled vitiates the fuel savings from
improvements in mileage per gallon. Indeed, during periods of stable or
declining gasoline prices, greater fuel economy of vehicles lowers the marginal
cost of driving, actually encouraging motorists to log more miles.
The
recent surge in nominal gasoline prices has slowed this boomerang, though not
for long. Prices will begin to sag in the months ahead. Moreover, adjusting for
inflation, even the current price of self-service regular is barely above where
it stood in 1996 and well below its peak 18 years ago.
By 1997 Americans
were motoring some 2.6 trillion miles a year--the equivalent of 10,715,511 trips
to the moon. The federal government's fuel-efficiency rules did nothing to
moderate this astronomical amount of motion, at least some of which is
extravagant and wasteful.
Naturally, this failure has implications for
the nation's thirst for oil and its environmental side effects. Transportation
in the United States burns most of the petroleum we buy. It accounts for most of
our rising volume of imported oil (which is now up to half our consumption), and
for more than half of the damaging chemicals we emit into the atmosphere. While
the use of oil dropped in virtually every other sector of the economy between
1973 and 1998, transportation's was up 36 percent. If the aim of government
policy is to reverse this trend, reduce the level of oil imports and improve air
quality, something other than automotive fuel-economy mandates is necessary.
Like it or not, that something is a higher price at the pump. In an
election year, politicians wince at the thought, but if the current spike were
permanent, it would likely conserve energy more efficiently over the long haul
than does the flawed fuel-economy law. A few years ago, a joint study by the
Century Foundation and the Brookings Institution estimated that a 25-cent
increase in the federal gasoline tax would have saved more oil than the
fuel-economy scheme did from its inception. The reason: economics. Steeper fuel
costs affect driving habits, not just the vehicle design, and have an effect on
the use of all vehicles, not just new models.
Rather than waste time
tweaking the anachronistic 1978 regulatory regime, policymakers might consider
these facts: Each year Americans chalk up approximately twice as many vehicle
miles per capita as Germans and more than three times as many as the Japanese.
This is not because Japanese and Germany consumers cannot afford cars. Nor is it
because Germany and Japan regulate their automobile industries more stringently.
Instead, much of the explanation for why people in those countries drive less,
ride public transit, walk more and consume far less oil per person is simply
that gasoline costs a lot more than it does here.
The writer is
a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
GRAPHIC: ILL,,barrie maguire
LOAD-DATE: April 24, 2000 
