Advocate Summary

Issue:  CAFÉ standards (107th)
Advocate:  Union of Concerned Scientists - Michelle Robinson
Date of Interview: 7/24/02

Basic Background
Okay.  Well, I’d say the overarching goal, I’ll give you my list as well.  For us to get the fuel economy of cars and trucks increased substantially over the next ten, fifteen years.  There haven’t been any regulatory changes, any changes in the fuel economy standards for, well the original law was put into place in 1975 and there really haven’t been any adjustments to the standards for about 15 years, a little more than 15 years.  
	And in fact, the overall fuel economy of cars and trucks, the overall actual performance, how many miles to the gallon that they get, is at a 21 year low.  So though they, basically the industry is barely meeting the current standards.  And what we know, because we’ve done pretty extensive analysis, as has the National Academy of Sciences and other folks that we work with in the automotive and engineering world, is that the industry has technology available to them, existing, affordable, off the shelf technology.  
	It’s not even advanced, super duper technology.  That would bring the fuel economy of cars and trucks up to about 40 miles per gallon in the next, by 2012 or so.  That’s just using existing technology that we know they have.  And we know they can do that affordably.  The cost for that kind of an improvement in fuel economy would be, per car it would be a little over a thousand dollars, maybe $1500 at the outside.  
	But the consumer, and assuming the industry passes that cost onto the consumer, the consumer then makes that back a few times over in gasoline savings at the pump, over the life of the car.  So from a consumer standpoint, from an oil savings standpoint, which is also equivalent to our understanding of energy security and producing our reliance on foreign and domestic oil, and from a global warming standpoint, raising the fuel economy of cars and trucks significantly is the most important thing you can do. 

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
That’s why that’s such an important policy goal for us.  And so we have done, I mean in terms of activities, we have done, as I said, very comprehensive analysis studies, reports, both kind of in depth kinds of things like this.  This is the, you can have a copy of that.
	That’s a very comprehensive study that we did, that we did simultaneously as the National Academy of Sciences was also doing a very comprehensive look at, what would it take technologically, what would it cost, does the industry have the technology now, what would be the implications for job creation in the auto industry, what would be the implications for the economy at large, so consumer savings, but then broader economic implications, those kinds of things.
	So we looked at all of that in this study.  And it was used not just by our community, by the environmental community that has been working on this issue, but also by many people in Congress, to better understand the issues.  We presented lots of this information to the National Academy of Sciences as they were going through their process, and doing their analyses.
	And, I don’t want to say most importantly, but very important was also getting this information out to the media.  Because this issue had not been debated in a really comprehensive way, in over ten years, there were lots of folks in the media and lots of, there were lots of kind of nips out there.  And then there was a need to really rebut the industry’s arguments and help people in the media and policymakers and the public kind of see an alternative point of view.
	So lots of activities flowing from the different analyses that we’ve done.  But we also, and we used that in our advocacy, in our lobbying on the Hill, and as I say, in our outreach to the media.  But then there were follow on kinds of analyses.  And we would do things like, as various proposals were being developed by members of Congress for dealing with this issue, during the energy bill debate this past year, we would analyze those proposals.  
	We would say, okay, Senator Hollings wants to put forward a 36-mile per gallon increase over the next fifteen years.  How much oil would we save in that timeframe?  Is it equivalent to what we currently import from the Persian Gulf?  What kind of savings would consumers see at the gas pump?  How many tons of CO2 emissions would we be reducing?  Those kinds of things.  And so we played a role for the community, and I think were helpful to some Congressional offices, in understanding, in analyzing the impact of various proposals, and saying this is what, you know, these are some of the benefits from these kinds of proposals.
	And then alternatively, as the auto industry put forward a proposal on the House side, in the House of Representatives, sponsored by a very dear friend of theirs, John Dingell from Michigan.  They put out the proposal saying, calling on the agency that sets the standards, which is the National Highway Traffic Safety administration, NHTSA, to set a standard that would result in the savings of five billion gallons of gasoline over the next ten years or so.
	Well five billion gallons, boy that sounds pretty impressive.  Except we’re talking about gallons, as opposed to barrels of oil.  And when you do the analysis, when you do the number crunching and figure out what is that really equate to, what does that really mean.  You find that it’s equal to one day’s worth of oil use, and it’s also equal to less than one mile per gallon increase in fuel economy of cars.
	But if no one was out there kind of doing that kind of assessment, and saying what does this really mean in translating it for the media, and translating it for other offices in Congress, gosh, you know, you might just say, wow, we’ve done something significant here.  When in fact, it’s really negligible.
	And our proposal..how many billions of gallons versus the five billion gallons.  What was the number? I mean, it’s enormous, because what we’re talking about is actually, it would have saved almost four billion barrels of oil.  Well, let’s see, the primary proposal would have saved one, no I’m sorry, four billion barrels.  
	One million barrels of oil a day.  Okay.  So you put one million barrels of oil a day by 2012, and then that number goes up to almost four million barrels of oil a day by 2020 or something.  So the number goes up significantly, that curve.  But if you just compare, basically the same timeframe of what this five billion gallons proposal was that it was going to be implemented in and that similar kind of construct for the Hollings proposal.  
	For example, you have five billion gallons of gasoline over almost a ten-year period, and one million barrels of oil a day.  So there are, I think, 72 gallons.  I don’t want to get the numbers wrong.  So I think something like 72 gallons of gasoline in a barrel of oil, something like that.  Anyway, so you put those numbers next to each other and it is pretty clear. One is clearly meaningful and would make a big difference in our oil consumption and for the environment, and for consumers.  And the other one is really just smoke and mirrors.
	So we did those kinds of things.  We worked in a large coalition of organizations that, many of them based here in Washington, because of course, we were dealing with Congress.  But certainly lots of groups across the country were supportive of seeing something meaningful happen on fuel economy.  And either because they were concerned about global warming, or they felt like we are dangerously reliant on foreign oil and that that had implications in terms of our foreign policy.  And decisions that might be made about the conflict in the Middle East and that kind of thing.  
	Or they came at it from a public health perspective.  You know, both in terms of reducing global warming emissions that have a health, will have a health impact over time.  The effects of global warming will have a health impact.  
	But also you, as you reduce oil use, you also reduce other kinds of toxic pollution.  You reduce the need for refineries to kind of put the same kind of output of fuel that they do today, and so for communities around refineries, that kind of thing.  
	So there were, people who were supportive of this push for lots of different reasons that we tried to kind of bring together.  The religious community; some progressive folks in the business community, just, it was kind of an across the board, I think, a pretty broad coalition.

And actually, even because the wilderness organizations and as I say, the public health groups, I mean the folks from the broader coalition working on the Energy bill also worked to carry the message about the need for higher fuel economy standards.  
	We had a complimentary message that worked quite well, because instead of drilling, instead of going out there and just spoiling sensitive areas, it’s been a promise of what’s likely to be a very small amount of oil over time.  You could be saving; you could dwarf what you could get from drilling by just upping the fuel economy of our cars and trucks, by modest amounts.
	So we did a lot of that kind of comparative analysis, too.  Here’s what’s potentially retrievable from the Arctic, over the next ten, fifteen years or whatever timeframe you would choose.  And here’s what you would get from higher fuel economy standards over that same timeframe.  So the message was, we kind of supported each other in that message.

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
We’re just not going to get it under Bush we just have to keep working at it and getting people to see that it is feasible and maybe in time we can do it. 

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
	We worked with Senator Hollings, Senator Kerry, Senator McCain.  I would say those were kind of the leads in the Senate.  In the House, months earlier, we worked with Congressman Boehlert, who’s a Republican from New York, and Congressman Markey and Congressman Waxman, I guess, were the primary leads in the House.  We had pretty strong support from the Senate leadership, but obviously not from the House Leadership.
	So I would say those were kind of the key folks.  I mean, there were lots of other folks who were supportive.  Senator Feinstein, for example, was very supportive, and helpful along the way, Senator Snow, Senator Collins.  So we had, we actually had kind of some moderate Republicans in the Senate that were pretty strong supporters.

Targets of Direct Lobbying
I think you put people kind of into groups.  You say, these people are definitely with us.  These people are very likely against us, or definitely against us, because they’ve basically said they will lead the fight against us.  Or they’ve come out in the press, or told us directly, that there’s no way they’d ever support higher standards.  
	And then you’ve got all the folks in the middle.  And you spend a lot of time kind of understanding what makes them tick, and what kinds of arguments you can make that might be persuasive.
	I mean, that middle, it’s that middle group.  You try to whittle down that middle group.  You try to get people hopefully into the support column, and hopefully not characterized as definitely against you.  But yeah, you spend a lot of time working on that middle group of people and answering the questions that they have.  
	And making sure that people from their states and districts are contacting them and saying this is a critical issue for me, and talking to them in their states and districts.  Going to them and making sure that, if there are town meetings happening or other things going on, that people are there to say hey, this is really an important issue.
	There are just all sorts of, making sure that the press in their states have the best information that they can have, trying to generate editorials and those kinds of things.  I mean, there’s a whole set of activities that people on both sides of the issue are undertaking.  So, the same reason that we’re kind of looking at that middle group of people, and trying to help them better understand the issue, and trying to move them into a position of support.
	You know, the auto industry and others are actively spending a lot of time on that same set of people, saying, here’s why, if you vote for this, farmers in your district are going to throw you out of office.
	Or GM is going to close down a plant in your state.  Or all sorts of, kind of, much more kind of on the level of threat than on the level of the kinds of arguments that we try to make in terms of benefits to the consumers and the environment and that kind of thing.  But those are powerful arguments, so.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
No specific targets mentioned, though grassroots were used.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
So we did those kinds of things.  We worked in a large coalition of organizations that, many of them based here in Washington, because of course, we were dealing with Congress.  But certainly lots of groups across the country were supportive of seeing something meaningful happen on fuel economy.  And either because they were concerned about global warming, or they felt like we are dangerously reliant on foreign oil and that that had implications in terms of our foreign policy.  And decisions that might be made about the conflict in the Middle East and that kind of thing.  
	Or they came at it from a public health perspective.  You know, both in terms of reducing global warming emissions that have a health, will have a health impact over time.  The effects of global warming will have a health impact.  
	But also you, as you reduce oil use, you also reduce other kinds of toxic pollution.  You reduce the need for refineries to kind of put the same kind of output of fuel that they do today, and so for communities around refineries, that kind of thing.  
	So there were, people who were supportive of this push for lots of different reasons that we tried to kind of bring together.  The religious community; some progressive folks in the business community, just, it was kind of an across the board, I think, a pretty broad coalition.
We never named it as kind of a campaign or anything like that.  It was just really the set of groups that worked most in a more focused way on this issue.  There were lots of groups that worked together on the overall energy bill, of which this was one of the primary issues.
	So we were kind of a subset of the overall, much larger coalition, working on the Energy bill, which included proposals for drilling in the Arctic and drilling in other sensitive areas of this country for oil and gas.  
	And on our side of it, trying to promote renewable energy technologies for electricity.  So there’s a whole range of different major issue areas that our community had to kind of rally and organize and try to have an impact on.
	I would say the key groups are Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, some small organizations based here in Washington, like the Alliance to Save Energy, the American Council for an Energy efficient Economy, which is A-C-triple-E.  U.S. PIRG.  It’s funny, when you ask, when you try to name people how you miss key people at National environmental Trust, League of Conservation Voters.  It was kind of a subset of a larger set of groups.  
And actually, even because the wilderness organizations and as I say, the public health groups, I mean the folks from the broader coalition working on the Energy bill also worked to carry the message about the need for higher fuel economy standards.  
	We had a complimentary message that worked quite well, because instead of drilling, instead of going out there and just spoiling sensitive areas, it’s been a promise of what’s likely to be a very small amount of oil over time.  You could be saving; you could dwarf what you could get from drilling by just upping the fuel economy of our cars and trucks, by modest amounts.
	So we did a lot of that kind of comparative analysis, too.  Here’s what’s potentially retrievable from the Arctic, over the next ten, fifteen years or whatever timeframe you would choose.  And here’s what you would get from higher fuel economy standards over that same timeframe.  So the message was, we kind of supported each other in that message.

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
The UAW was, as they have been for some years, was pretty much in mock step with the industry.  I think there are some in UAW who actually believed that, actually don’t believe the industry doomsday kinds of numbers and tend to believe that if the big three manufacturers are required to make improved vehicles that there would be more jobs, as a part of that.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence 
	I guess, I mean the fundamental argument is oil savings.  I mean, the need to reduce our reliance on oil.  And then there are lots of reasons why that’s an important saying, and lots of benefits that flow from that.  But that was really kind of the number one argument, was to say that reliance, over-reliance, and increasing reliance on oil and especially foreign oil, has enormous negative impacts.  
	And unless we begin to move the trend in another direction, over time, I mean it would take, it’s going to take years to kind of turn this around, but unless we begin to reduce our consumption, all sorts of unfortunate things are likely to happen.
	So, that was kind of the number one motivation and the fundamental kind of argument.  I mean, I would say, that’s kind of on the impact’s side.  On the why this is doable kind of, you know, the number one argument from our perspective is the auto industry has the technology.  They’re just not using it.  
	I mean that’s, it was extremely fundamental for us to get that message out, that the auto industry has the technology now.  They have it.  There’s no disputing that.  And taking that argument off the table for the auto industry, because for years and years and years, they said, we don’t have the technology.  Well, now, they really can’t hide behind that argument anymore.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
They’ve brought up several new arguments, or several arguments, actually old arguments, but they’ve elevated arguments like, well consumers don’t really want fuel-efficient cars.  It’s not their number one priority when they come in to buy a car.  They don’t say, I want our most fuel-efficient car.  So therefore, we’re giving consumers what they want.  
	Well, from our perspective, when you actually ask a consumer, when consumers begin to understand.  Yes, maybe they want to purchase an SUV for their family needs or for whatever reason that they have.  That they want to purchase a vehicle that has fairly low gas mileage right now, but has other functional attributes that they care about.  When they find out that that SUV could get twice as far on a gallon of gas, at very, for maybe 700 additional dollars, and they’re going in and they’re already spending $40,000 for a car.  
	In poll after poll, they said, absolutely.  If I had a choice between a Ford Explorer that gets sixteen miles to the gallon and a Ford Explorer that gets almost 30 miles to the gallon?  You know, a no-brainer.  But that’s not the way the industry talks about consumer interest and consumer demand.
	So those are some of the secondary arguments that we try to rebut.  But I say the two fundamental rationales are a need to save oil and the fact that the industry has the technology now, they’re just not using it because they’re not required to.  And that’s always the question that people raise, whether it’s the media or the interested public or a member of Congress.  They say, well, if they have the technology, why aren’t they using it?
	Then the answer is, because they’re not required to.  They’ve never, ever, this industry has never done anything that they’re not required to do, frankly.  Some individual companies have done more.  For example, Honda has done, has been kind of ahead of other companies in cleaning up pollution from their tailpipe and making a more fuel-efficient car.  They’ve gone beyond the existing standards.
	But even Honda, you can’t, I don’t think you can really point to any manufacturer and say that they’ve, without the threat of government regulations, they would not have done any of this.  So I think that’s kind of a fundamental point for us.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
And yes we target different arguments; it just depends on their constituency base, whatever their parochial interests are.  So if they are a Senator from Nebraska, they’re going to care about if this is going to impact farmers, the whole pickup truck issue.  They’re going to have a different kind of constituency that they care about.  
	But also we look at who they are, how many years they’ve been in Congress, what their votes have been in the past.  We try to talk to their staff and to the members directly, and kind of understand what their questions and concerns are on the issue and try to address those.  Everybody just comes from their own kind of idiosyncratic place.  Some people have just predilections and kind of an ideological foundation that they work from.
	Some people are just ideologically opposed to regulation.  There are particularly conservative Republicans, for example, and have run for years opposing onerous government regulation, then it may be a challenge to get them to support regulation in this context.  So it just, you know, you have to kind of create a profile of every important member that you need to talk to, and kind of understand.  
	I think you put people kind of into groups.  You say, these people are definitely with us.  These people are very likely against us, or definitely against us, because they’ve basically said they will lead the fight against us.  Or they’ve come out in the press, or told us directly, that there’s no way they’d ever support higher standards.  
	And then you’ve got all the folks in the middle.  And you spend a lot of time kind of understanding what makes them tick, and what kinds of arguments you can make that might be persuasive.

Nature of the Opposition
[The automobile industry]

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Consumer choice is a top argument for the industry.  Another argument they’ve used is safety.  They basically say, if you make us make cars more fuel efficient, we’re going to have to start making little teeny Pintos and Civics and Mavericks, and all the big cars will go away.  
	A big part of their ad campaign, before the vote in Congress this past year was, they had ads running in rural America saying, Congress is going to take away your pickup truck.  And you’re going to be hauling hay in the back of a little Pinto, kind of thing.  They don’t make Pintos anymore, but a little Escort.  
	And in suburban America, they were running ads on the radio and newspapers and other places saying, did you know the government’s going to take away your SUV?  I mean, that was the language that they used.  I don’t know if you happened to catch this.  I guess you’re in Pennsylvania, right?  You’re not in the Washington area.  I mean you are right now, but, I know they were running the ads here in Washington.  
	It’s kind of, are you familiar with the Harry and Louise ads?  It was a similar kind of format.  Husband and wife talking at the kitchen table and the wife says, honey have you seen this?  The Senate is getting ready to vote to take away my SUV?  I need my SUV.  Take the kids to school and go to the market, and da da da da, you know.  I mean, just this is absolutely absurd.  I mean, it doesn’t even pass the laugh test. So it was all, motherhood and apple pie and pick up trucks. And you know don’t take our fucking pick up trucks.
	And I don’t actually think it was persuasive with the public.  All the polling that was done at the beginning of the process of the Congressional debate on this issue, and the polling that was done at the very end, in fact, after the votes, showed that the public says, absolutely, we ought to have higher fuel economy standards.  We think the auto industry could do it.  Government should require them to do it.  We want to save money at the pump.  We want to reduce our reliance on oil, et cetera.  
	So I don’t think that, in truth, I don’t think those kinds of arguments are aimed at the public by the industry.  They’re aimed at scaring the shit out of members of Congress.  And they worked.  You know, there were several members of Congress who thought, oh my gosh, my rural constituents actually, they thought that their rural constituents might believe that if they voted for higher fuel economy standards that they were voting to take away their pickup truck.  
	So, I mean that’s just the way these debates and these kinds of campaigns, especially campaigns that are based on some pretty major lies, they can unfortunately have an impact.  And even though those arguments, no one in the press believed those arguments.  
	I don’t think anyone in the public really believed those arguments.  But they’re extremely difficult to rebut, from a kind of intellectual standpoint.  We had chapter and verse on why the industry actually can more easily, in some ways, improve the fuel economy of a pickup truck, for example.  And yet they haven’t been required to.
	So there’s so much they could do.  They’ve already done a good deal on cars.  So cars are less the issue but pickup trucks, SUVs, I mean, trucks in general.  Just so many technologies that aren’t being used, that it actually would be fairly cost effective and fairly straight forward to increase the fuel economy of that segment of vehicles.  And you’d be providing enormous consumer benefits.  You wouldn’t be taking anything away from anyone.
	So even with those kinds of hyperbolic arguments from the industry, it’s very challenging to rebut that kind of thing.  They spent millions and millions of dollars amplifying those arguments out to the public, so that members of Congress felt like the word on the street was that higher fuel economy standards meant less choice for consumers, those kinds of things.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition  
They’ve brought up several new arguments, or several arguments, actually old arguments, but they’ve elevated arguments like, well consumers don’t really want fuel-efficient cars.  It’s not their number one priority when they come in to buy a car.  They don’t say, I want our most fuel-efficient car.  So therefore, we’re giving consumers what they want.  
	Well, from our perspective, when you actually ask a consumer, when consumers begin to understand.  Yes, maybe they want to purchase an SUV for their family needs or for whatever reason that they have.  That they want to purchase a vehicle that has fairly low gas mileage right now, but has other functional attributes that they care about.  When they find out that that SUV could get twice as far on a gallon of gas, at very, for maybe 700 additional dollars, and they’re going in and they’re already spending $40,000 for a car.  
	In poll after poll, they said, absolutely.  If I had a choice between a Ford Explorer that gets sixteen miles to the gallon and a Ford Explorer that gets almost 30 miles to the gallon?  You know, a no-brainer.  But that’s not the way the industry talks about consumer interest and consumer demand.

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
I would say, the other the other argument that the industry made.  The big three domestic, so called domestic, I mean Honda and Toyota have lots of domestic manufacturing now.  They have plants here in several states in the U.S., so that they’re not really, even though they’re still known as the Japanese auto makers, they certainly are employing a lot of people.  
	But there were competitiveness and kind of jobs arguments that the industry put forward.  Saying basically that particularly GM, Ford and Chrysler put forward, saying if you increase standards, we’ll have to layoff thousands of people in your state.  And they would go kind of state by state, office by office, with this, you know, these analyses that, as far as we could tell, were based on pure speculation, and the absolute worst case scenario kind of thing.  
	And we did our own jobs analysis that showed actually job growth in the auto industry if you increased standards, because you’re actually adding jobs in the part of the manufacturing process where people are adding new technologies.  So it’s actually a win for union workers and for workers in that industry.
	But anyway, that was another argument that was a pretty important argument with individual members of Congress who had a lot of manufacturing in their states.
	The UAW was, as they have been for some years, was pretty much in mock step with the industry.  I think there are some in UAW who actually believed that, actually don’t believe the industry doomsday kinds of numbers and tend to believe that if the big three manufacturers are required to make improved vehicles that there would be more jobs, as a part of that.
	Their analysis was basically done with manufacturer kind of support and numbers.  So as far as we can tell, again, it’s not based on any kind of real numbers and assumptions that kind of reflected reality. And I don’t want to basically say that every single bit of information they shared with officers was inaccurate, but I would say it was highly inflated and based on some bad assumptions.	
	But again, that’s kind of our word against theirs, when you go into a Congressional office.  Say a member of Congress from Indiana or Missouri or Ohio or Wisconsin, or obviously Michigan.  I mean, those are all states that have pretty serious auto manufacturing in them and thousands and thousands of jobs.  
	And if you’ve got UAW, and a rep from General Motors coming in, and saying if you do this, we, General Motors, will have to shut down this plant.  That will put 30,000 people out of work, and we, UAW, are concerned that GM might shut down this plant and put 30,000 people out of work.  
	And they can basically threaten all kinds of things, the manufacturers can.  And then UAW kind of has to base their speculation about what might happen to union jobs on what the manufacturer is saying.  So one day they come into a Missouri office and say, here’s what will happen if you vote for this.  And then we come in, the next day, with our information and basically trying to paint a very different picture.  
	And if you’re a Senator or a House member, you kind of think, well, Union of Concerned Scientists has good information.  It’s reliable.  This makes it a very difficult decision for me, but this guy is a UAW local president from St. Louis, and the rep from the GM plant in St. Louis.
	And you know, certainly even if your heart’s in the right place, as a policymaker.  And you think, I want to go with what I, the information that I think is accurate.  And I’m going to take a political risk and I’m going to take a personal risk.  And I’m going to go for this.  Your staff is going to be recommending that you pay a little more, give a little more weight to the arguments coming from the folks from your state.
	And even, you can get, I mean it’s, I don’t want to paint a completely discouraging picture, because I think there are some people who do have real courage.  And also recognize that these are individuals who represent a company and a labor leader who has to keep a good relationship with that company.  
	For reasons that are very distinct from the topic at hand, they have contract negotiations going on, on almost a constant basis, with the manufacturers, if you’re a labor leader.  So you can’t piss off the manufacturer.  And you’ve got to tend to that relationship.
	When polls have been done of UAW workers, sort of rank and file, not the leadership, but the people who are actually on the production lines and in the plants.  And you ask them, do you support higher fuel economy standards?  Do you think that would increase jobs, or do you think that would be a benefit to you and your family, 80 to 85, sometimes 90 percent say, absolutely.
	So if there -- one of the things we’ve struggled with is how do we communicate or encourage UAW households to communicate to their elected officials.  That they, in fact, think it would be beneficial to them, as a community and as a workforce, to have higher fuel economy vehicles being built.  But that’s very challenging.  Because the leadership is kind of locked into a position that it is very difficult to get them to move off of.
	So, and certainly, I would say a majority of constituents in almost every, across the country and most every state, supports more fuel-efficient vehicles.  They think it’s doable and they think it’s a good idea.  But that’s not an organized group, that you can kind of trot into an office and say, hi, I represent this many thousand people in your state.  So that’s kind of the reality of what we’re dealing with.

Described as a Partisan Issue
No

Venue(s) of Activity
House
Senate

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
The Energy bill is in conference

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
Opposed to the status quo, working to strengthen CAFÉ standards 

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I’ve been here for going on eleven years.  And I came to UCS, I had been working actually on nuclear weapons issues.  And arms control issues here in Washington, for a bunch of years.  And then moved to California, and had wanted to get more involved in environmental advocacy. And I heard that UCS was opening up an office in Berkeley.  So I went and found out more about it, and I ended up being the first person that they, other than the person opening up the office, that they hired to work with the office out there.  So that’s kind of how I got into the organization initially and began working on transportation policy, and kind of the air pollution, energy, climate impacts of transportation.
	And then, so I spent five years in the Berkeley office and then I moved to Cambridge, actually, to the national office and worked there for about four years, and now I’ve been here for about two years.  So I’m actually the only person ever at UCS that’s worked out of all three offices for any appreciable period of time.  So they keep saying they’re going to have to have a plaque or something for me when I go.
	And just, what brought me to the work is that, I had been an activist on a number of issues myself in college.  And actually I started out as an art and drama major in college, and thought that was really my calling.  And then Ronald Reagan got elected president and it blew my mind that this country would elect him to its highest office.  
	So I said, you know all this extracurricular political work I’ve been doing on the side?  Maybe I’ll switch and do the art and drama on the side, and get into political science.  So that’s what I ended up doing.  And pretty soon thereafter I arrived at the conclusion that I wanted to be a lobbyist.  So even before I was out of college, that was, people would say, what do you think you’re going to do when you leave here.  I would say, well, I’m going to go be a lobbyist.  And they’d say, what, are you crazy?  Why do you want to do that?  So anyway, so that’s kind of my history.
I really love it.  I have to say.  I mean, and I do, very often, have the occasion to speak to groups.  And there are lots of groups of high school students and college students that come through Washington.  And I’m often one of the first lobbyists that they’ve heard from that is a public interest lobbyist.
	And that’s really important to me, to kind of get the word out that you can, that there are lobbyists who are working on behalf of the public interest, versus a narrow, private corporate interest.  So anyway, so that’s me.

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We are a little different in that we kind of blend analysis, advocacy and public outreach.  And that isn’t always the case.  I mean, some of the groups I mentioned earlier, like ACEEE for example, much more, kind of a smaller think tank kind of construct.  We are definitely not a think tank.  
	We are proud of the research that we do.  And we stand by it.  And it’s a big element of our credibility and what we do, but we want to make sure that that research doesn’t just sit on a shelf.  We want to make sure that it’s out there, that it’s a part of the public domain and generating media attention, generating public understanding of the issues, and that it’s accessible to policymakers.  
	It’s not just, that’s why we do a report like this, like the one I showed you that’s called Drilling in Detroit, versus the benefits and da, da, da, da, you know, of raising fuel economy standards.  I mean, it could be a much drier kind of tone of analysis and information.  But we try to make sure it’s packaged and accessible.  And will therefore, hopefully, have more of an impact.
	So we have researchers.  We have, in the transportation group here, for example, we have a couple of senior analysts.  Actually we have, I guess, three analysts in the transportation program.  We have advocates.  A couple of us are advocates, lobbyists, whatever word you want to use.  
	And then we have organizers.  They’re the folks who are engaging our membership, who are getting the word out to them about ways that they can influence decisions that are being made and working with other groups in the states, trying to build coalitions, trying to build support for various things that we’re working on.
	We do occasionally work with consultants, particularly on analysis, not so much on any of the other pieces.  And that’s really just if there’s a piece of an analysis that is, that perhaps our folks in house don’t have the deepest expertise on, but we want to have for example, actually, drilling in Detroit’s a good example.  
	We worked with, in conjunction with another organization and one of them was also a consultant, the Center for Auto Safety.  So it was kind of a joint study.  But we wanted to have a chapter in Drilling in Detroit that was very in depth on the safety implications of fuel economy standards.  
	And so we worked with the Center for Auto Safety.  And a gentleman named Carl Nash (phonetic), who had been at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for almost thirty years.  So that we made sure that, when people saw this analysis, they understood that that piece of the analysis was done based on some pretty deep expertise.
	So that kind of thing happens for us.  But it’s just a case by case basis.  I don’t know what else should I, what else would be helpful to say on that stuff…
	We occasionally will commission a poll, here at UCS, but it’s, we don’t have the resources to do a whole lot of that.  So we do do some, kind of public opinion stuff.  And we’ve done some focus groups in the past on various issues and that kind of thing, but it’s a pretty small part of it.
	We do have a network that we’ve created over the last, gosh, I think probably seven years or so now, almost ten years, that we call the sound science initiative.  And that is made, that’s a kind of a subset of our membership.  We’ve got about almost 80,000 people who are members, and who are supportive of the organization.  
	So that runs the gamut from kind of high donors to the organization.  A large segment of that, a little over half of that, are people from the scientific community or academia.  But also all the way to activists who just signed up on our website and said I want to get in your next action alert, and I want to take action on the issues you’re working on.  So that’s a pretty broadly defined group.  
	But within the group of scientist supporters of the organization, we have about 3,000 who are part of this, as I said, sound science initiative, this network.  And they are apt to partake in a number of activities, and are really active with us in doing things like contacting policymakers directly, testifying before Congress or in their states.  Writing letters to the editor, writing opinion editorials, rebutting kind of the junk science information that is constantly being put out by folks on the other side of the issues, you know, that CO2 is good for you, and it makes plants grow.  And global warming’s a myth, and all of that stuff.
	This network’s kind of mission or goal is to be out there making sure that the right science, or that solid, sound, scientific information is out there to kind of enhance the debate, overall, public debate and policy debate.
	So that’s a little different, they cover kind of more global environmental issues, like global warming.  The expertise and the issues that they’re apt to work with us on, occasionally will be things like fuel economy because it certainly is one of the most important things you can do in terms of reducing global warming.  But they also work on, they also have expertise in biodiversity and some of the other issues that we work on here.
	Actually our, the analyst, David Friedman, who did our report, Drilling in Detroit.  Yeah, he testified on our behalf on CAFE.  And actually, the co-authors, Clarence Ditlow and Carl Nash also testified.  But they have their own kind of organizational and historical expertise that meant that they were important people to come and testify.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Three – Four

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
So we have researchers.  We have, in the transportation group here, for example, we have a couple of senior analysts.  Actually we have, I guess, three analysts in the transportation program.  We have advocates.  A couple of us are advocates, lobbyists, whatever word you want to use.  
	And then we have organizers.  They’re the folks who are engaging our membership, who are getting the word out to them about ways that they can influence decisions that are being made and working with other groups in the states, trying to build coalitions, trying to build support for various things that we’re working on.

Well we have five different programs.  So I’m just working with the transportation program here, or at least, in terms of my advocacy work, I am the lead advocate for the transportation program.  But we have a program that is called our global security program that works on nuclear weapons issues, arms control, trying to have a more reasonable approach to things like weapons in space and star wars and those kinds of things.
	And that was really, in part that was why we were founded.  We were founded by several physicists at MIT who were very concerned about the nuclear arms race in the late sixties.  That then flowed into an interest in nuclear power in that, kind of same timeframe.  And so we have an energy program that works on nuclear power plant safety and on promoting cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear and alternative forms of energy generation.
	And so then our transportation program and our, we have a program that we call our food and environment program, which focuses on genetically modified foods on antibiotic, overuse of human antibiotics and animal production, those kinds of issues.  
	And then we have what we call our global environment program, which is the program that kind of is the umbrella for our work on biodiversity, global warming, excuse me, you know kind of broader global environmental issues.  There’s some overlap, obviously, but we have to kind of coordinate among the energy and transportation, global environment programs.
	So, all told, let’s see.  Between three offices, our national office is in Cambridge.  Then we have the D.C. office here, and then our office in Berkeley, California, which houses most of the rest of our transportation staff, actually.  And some energy work.  And I think we’re probably at about sixty people among three offices, something like that.
	So relative to some other large organizations, like the ones that I mentioned earlier, many of those organizations will have sixty people in one office.  So we’re kind of, we’re not a small organization but we’re also not a huge organization.  We fall somewhere in the middle.  I think we’re kind of leaning toward larger kind of, the way I think about it.  Or that we’ve been smart about trying to grow the organization.

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous