Free Republic

Conservation: The Chevy Volt is said to be able to get 230 miles per gallon. That's if it's continually plugged into a fragile and overburdened power grid. Where will you be when the lights go out? Since most U.S. electricity generation is not carbon-free, the Congressional Research Service agrees. The "widespread adoption of plug-in hybrid vehicles through 2030 may have only a small effect on, and might actually increase, carbon emissions," it observes. "If you are using coal-fired power plants and half the country's electricity comes from coal powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?"...

Although a batch of documents recently released by the Bush Energy Department was supposed to embarrass Republicans, it also revealed an interesting nugget about a powerful Democrat, Debbie Dingell, wife of Rep. John Dingell (Mich.). Mrs. Dingell, who gave HOHholy hell a few years ago for referring to her in print as a "lobbyist" for General Motors, has always insisted that she merely runs the foundation that takes care of the auto giant's philanthropic activities. These days, Dingell says, she's in charge of "worldwide community relations" for the company. So you can imagine HOH's surprise upon noticing that Dingell turned...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another.It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else. "If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading...

Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs "to put nothing in writing, ever" regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner's conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner "intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards." Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions, so instructing participants in...

Alternative Energy: A government report says reliance on electric cars will do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and may merely shift our dependence on foreign sources from one set of dictators to another..."If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

[California] has regulated and spent itself into a well of debt so deep it makes the economic situation in the other 49 states seem not half-bad. But instead of putting a chokehold on California's run-amok bureaucrats, the federal government just gave them the go ahead to impose California-specific fuel economy and emissions control requirements on new cars sold there, beginning with the 2016 model year. California has long wanted to demand that new cars achieve 40 mpg, on average -- 5 mph higher than the "49 state" requirement recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. Now...

General Motors can survive bankruptcy far more easily than it can survive President Barack Obama's ambitious fuel economy standards, which mandate that all new vehicles average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. The actual Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) results will depend on the mixture of fuel-thrifty and fuel-thirsty vehicles consumers choose to buy from each manufacturer -- not on what producers hope to sell. That means only those companies most successful in selling the smallest cars with the smallest engines will, in the future, be allowed to sell the more profitable larger pickups and SUVs and more powerful luxury...

Regulation: Ignoring the first rule of holes, a bankrupt state passing out IOUs welcomes an EPA waiver allowing it to further kill its economy. Too bad the state can't stop the air pollution imported from a growing China. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday granted California its long-standing request — denied by the Bush administration — for a waiver to allow it to impose even more stringent air pollution rules than currently required by the federal government.The way is now clear for implementation of a 2002 state law requiring new cars to increase their fuel economy 40% by 2016....

Get ready, folks. America has bought a car company. As of Monday, we, the taxpayers, own a majority stake in General Motors Corp. Whether the company will be formally renamed Government Motors remains to be seen. But that's what it will be. GM filed for bankruptcy Monday. Instead of putting the failed car enterprise into bankruptcy six months ago - where Carl Icahn or Wilbur Ross could have bought it - the Bush administration chose Bailout Nation. Under Team Obama, that bailout has morphed into full-scale government ownership. Twenty billion dollars of Troubled Asset Relief Program money is already invested...

It’s rare that we test two-year-old cars, but this particular Accord is rarer—in the U.S., anyway—than burlesque houses in a Texan polygamy camp. Under the hood is a 2.2-liter four-cylinder engine. It’s happy as low as 1300 rpm, but power starts at about 1600, with a whopping 251 pound-feet of torque (55 percent more than the current four-cylinder Accord) available at 2000 rpm. There is a nearly imperceptible difference between 70- or 80-percent throttle and flat-footing it, meaning the car feels quick when driven at about 8/10th, but sluggish when it’s really hammered. It took 8.9 seconds to wind the...

Ordinary light bulbs are supposed to disappear in the next few years as exotic new lighting technologies become common. Much of our electricity will be generated by wind and sun. Car fuel will be extracted from trees and grass. So lawmakers have mandated. Now President Obama has proposed a new energy initiative, one of the most ambitious in decades, that would require the average car to get 40 percent more miles on each gallon. At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. But as the ups and downs of the nation’s energy policy have demonstrated over the last 35 years,...

President Obama announced on May 19, 2009, a “historic agreement to help America break its addiction to oil.� The centerpiece of that announcement was a new 35.5-mpg CAFE standard for 2016. Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has been advocating the entry of fuel-efficient cars into the market for years. The time is now ripe, and we are in the midst of a major national push for the adoption of these cars. One of the barriers to widespread adoption is the common-yet-misleading line of logic that most consumers follow—that fuel efficiency equates to smaller, less safe cars. This misperception is fed by...

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda's new low-priced hybrid. So far, though, you have not been told what it's like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place. So here it comes. It's terrible. Biblically terrible. It doesn't work. Acceleration is poor. And the sound is worse. So you're sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you're doing only 23 mph and you're thinking things can't get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of...

After 120 days of the new presidency, the automobile industry provides some of the best evidence of an administration that favors the heavy hand of government meddling in the private sector. And as is the case with mostcoverage of President Obama and his policies, criticism of his automotive tinkering has been sparse. On May 19, Obama announced a 30-percent increase in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which would come to a 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) average for both cars and light trucks. It will equate to a higher percentage increase for cars, up from its current level of...

When Obama unveiled new fuel standards we decried the end of fun cars and pointed out how far most automakers are from meeting new-for-2016 fuel standards. It turns out, thanks to Hummer-sized loopholes like your car's air-conditioning, automakers should be able to meet them with little fear.

That thud you just heard was the “other shoe” dropping in Washington, D.C.: the Obama administration has used the turmoil in the auto industry as an opportunity to nudge—okay, force—the industry into a new, more environmentally sensitive direction, thus making good on its promise to impose stricter Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and tailpipe emissions standards across the automobile industry. ... Senator after senator cites as evidence for the attainability of these standards the vehicles sold in Europe. But car for car, European vehicles aren't meaningfully more efficient. Take the Ford Focus sedan, a car that's comparably sized here and...

It had taken weeks of hardball negotiations, but on Sunday afternoon, White House officials thought everything was falling into place. In less than 48 hours they would unveil a landmark deal with U.S. automakers to impose sharply higher fuel-efficiency standards on new cars and trucks. Then at 3 p.m., the telephone rang. A senior Ford executive said the company had run the numbers again and concluded it might not survive if it accepted the deal. If Ford pulled out, it would mean a major setback for two of President Obama's signature goals -- combating global warming and reducing the nation's...

The Obama administration’s proposed mileage standards that were announced may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War — his signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama’s standards will require automakers to meet a 35 miles-per-gallon standard by 2016 — four years earlier than the same standard imposed by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007. As discussed in my new book Green Hell, the only way for carmakers to meet these standard is to make smaller, lighter and deadlier cars. The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage standards with about 2,000 deaths per...

The Obama administration’s proposed mileage standards that will be announced today may kill more Americans at a faster rate than the Iraq War — his signature issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama’s standards will require automakers to meet a 35 miles-per-gallon standard by 2016 — four years earlier than the same standard imposed by the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007. As discussed in my new book “Green Hell,” the only way for carmakers to meet these standards is to make smaller, lighter and deadlier cars. The National Academy of Sciences has linked mileage standards with about 2,000...

Under Supreme Leader Obama’s directive of ‘I’m in power now, I’ve seized your country to destroy it as I choose and none of you can do anything about it’, new attacks (which could logically be called “hate crimes”) against the American people are in full play. Laughing almost as gleefully during his daily television appearance on Tuesday 19 May—as he probably did while he watched his TV showing the masses in New York running from his flyover 747 and two fighter jets—the US Dictator Obama smiled while delivering the news that essentially said that US citizens will probably no longer...

Can you hear that? It's the sound of the final nail being hammered down onto the coffin lid of the U.S. car industry. President Obama wields the hammer -- in the form of a massive uptick in federally required fuel economy standards that will require each automaker's lineup of new vehicles to achieve an average of 35.5 MPG by 2016. But what could be so bad about forcing the automakers to make cars more fuel efficient? Dig deeper and you'll see. Even the Obama people concede the new mileage standards will cost American consumers about $1,600 per vehicle by 2016...

With his latest installment of ever-higher fuel mileage requirements for the auto industry, Barack Obama embraces a momentary, crisis-spawned expansion of the art of the possible, unleavened by any art of the rationally desirable. Detroit is dependent on Washington loans for survival. The industry's lobbyists and its congressional allies have collapsed in a heap, offering no resistance. So why not go for broke? If you're alone in front of the shrimp buffet, why not eat all the shrimp -- even if it makes you barf later? Defenders of the Obama administration's Chrysler bankruptcy finagle misguidedly argue that, if not for...

President Barack Obama said new government rules designed to boost fuel efficiency and slash greenhouse-gas emissions will give auto makers "clear certainty" at a time when their business is enduring a "historic crisis." "In the past, an agreement such as this would have been considered impossible," Mr. Obama said in a speech in the Rose Garden, where he was joined by auto executives, state governors and car-union officials. "At a time of historic crisis in our auto industry... this rule provides the clear certainty that will allow these companies to plan for a future in which they are building the...

At the end of his Rose Garden explanation yesterday of the new U.S. fuel-efficiency standards, President Obama remarked on the good that can be accomplished when we are "working together." The President may be getting ahead of himself. Watching the unlikely coalition arrayed behind him as Mr. Obama committed the U.S. to an astonishing passenger-car mileage average of 39 miles per gallon by 2016, it looks truer to say we are merely standing together in this adventure, for better or worse. Mr. Obama's fleet-mileage partners yesterday included the two auto companies that have fallen into his arms, Chrysler and GM,...

Excerpts from "New Obama rules will transform US auto fleet" : Carpenters will still haul materials around in pickup trucks, but they will cost more. So business' will get hit with higher costs. Especially small business'. Can our bankrupt car companies afford to sell less of trucks - a best seller? That means cars and trucks on American roads will have to become smaller, lighter and more efficient. "Smaller, lighter" to me means "less safe." I don't care if a Prius meets government standards, you can't change physics. More steel, more weight, more protection. Already on Tuesday, some drivers were...

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil but are expected to cost consumers an extra $1,300 per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016. Obama on Tuesday planned to announce the first-ever national emissions limits for vehicles, as well as require an overall or industry average fuel efficiency standard at 35.5 miles per gallon. Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate director, publicly confirmed the new initiative in appearances on morning network news shows, calling it a "truly historic" occasion and saying...

President Obama announced tough new nationwide rules for automobile emissions and mileage standards on Tuesday, embracing standards that California has sought to enact for years over the objections of the auto industry and the Bush administration. “For the first time in history, we have set in motion a national policy aimed at both increasing gas mileage and decreasing greenhouse gas pollution for all new trucks and cars sold in the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said in remarks from Washington, flanked by officials from Michigan and California. The rules, which will begin to take effect in 2012, will put...

The new fuel economy rules announced by the government are more than a challenge; they could end our era of cheap transportation. If they can be met, and that is questionable without some cheating on the rulemaking, cars will be small and expensive--or larger and very expensive. The word coming from Washington is that a 35.5 mile average per gallon requirement will be set for vehicles by 2016, meaning something like 43 miles per gallon for cars and 26 miles per gallon for trucks. Rules are easy to make. Companies like General Motors ( GM - news - people )...

I didn’t realize the socialist horror of what the administration has done until I got to the end of the Bob Lonsberry’s article, “Government Wrong To Hose Car Dealers.” Then, I realized the author had missed the central point. Lonsberry fails to understand who finances the auto manufacturers; the dealerships. By destroying the manufacturer’s financing arm Obama destroys any possibility that the manufacturers can ever recover. Government support, and, therefore, control, will be required forever. Here’s how the pre-Obama financing system functions. Let’s say your dealership sells 100 cars a month. You keep an inventory of 200 cars on-hand. The...

– Some soccer moms will have to give up hulking SUVs. Carpenters will still haul materials around in pickup trucks, but they will cost more.

Obama unveils 'historic' car efficiency standards by Stephen Collinson Tue May 19, 5:06 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama Tuesday unveiled "historic" efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for US cars, forging a rare moment of unity between auto firms and environmentalists on climate change. "For the first time in history, we have set in motion a national policy aimed at both increasing gas mileage and decreasing green house gas pollution for all new trucks and cars sold in the United States," Obama said. The president gathered 10 auto industry chiefs, from crippled US firms to foreign giants, plus...

There's a whole lot of chatter about Obama's new decree on CAFE standards today and rightly so. I wonder why the old CAFE standards came from Congress and Obama just gets to decree his? Oh, well, so much for the Constitution. I'm curious about fuel standards because of simple personal experience. My dad had a 1987 Buick Skylark that we all fit into for normal trips to church and whatnot. It had a 2.5L 4cylinder engine, 4 doors, made about 30 mpg's (but my dad drives really, really slow), and got the job done. Granted, we had a full blown...

President Obama plans to propose the first-ever national emission limits for cars and trucks as well as average mileage requirements of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 -- all costing consumers an extra $1,300 per vehicle. Obama's plan couples for the first time pollution reduction from vehicle tailpipes with increased efficiency on the road. It would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil through 2016 and would be the environmental equivalent to taking 177 million cars off the road, senior administration officials said Monday night. The plan also would effectively end a feud between automakers and statehouses over emission standards --...

According to reports in The New York Times and elsewhere, President Barack Obama will resolve conflicts between state and Federal fuel economy standards by announcing that California's stricter limits will be applied nationwide. By the 2016 model year, new rules will require each carmaker's Corporate Average Fleet Economy (CAFE) to reach 42 miles per gallon, weighted by sales. That is the level effectively required by California's limits on greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide.

The Obama administration will issue new national requirements for the emissions and mileage of cars and light trucks in an effort to end a long-running conflict among the states, the federal government and auto manufacturers, industry officials said Monday. President Obama will announce as early as Tuesday that he will combine California’s tough new auto-emissions rules with the existing corporate average fuel economy standard to create a single new national standard, the officials said. As a result, cars and light trucks sold in the United States will be roughly 30 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016. The White House...

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) - Bombs destroyed an Internet cafe, wrecked a bus carrying handicapped children and spread panic through Pakistan's main northwestern city on Saturday, killing at least 11 people in a day of carnage across the militancy-plagued region. Digg Up.

There’s an old saying -- you can’t repeal the laws of physics. That may be the discussion right now at several small-car manufacturers today. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, known for its slow-motion car crash videos, sent the Honda Fit crashing into a Honda Accord, the Smart ForTwo into a Mercedes C-Class and a Toyota Yaris into a Toyota Camry -- each at 40 miles per hour. The results indicate what safety you may be trading for efficiency when your mode of transportation shrinks. The tests are called "offset" crashes. The cars crash not quite head on, similar to...

The Obama administration is preparing to test whether capping greenhouse gas emissions will push the economy into higher gear, or deeper into a rut. The likely subject of the experiment is the ailing auto industry. Later this month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is expected to declare that carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles endanger health and welfare because of their impact on the climate. That finding will be a trigger for the EPA to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act -- independent of any congressional action on broader climate-change measures. A senior administration official familiar with...

Imagine a Google executive demanding a tax on software, or General Mills asking for a tax on wheat. That's where we now are in the U.S. auto industry, with Ford CEO Alan Mulally believing he has little choice but to seek a tax on the very fuel that powers his products. Mr. Mulally was a guest recently at this newspaper's ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, where he outlined his efforts to revamp the struggling car maker. He said one problem is that America didn't have an "integrated energy policy." On the one hand, the government "regulated" smaller cars by "mandating...

Indonesia Update In a South Jakarta courtroom this week, a Singaporean terror suspect admitted that he was part of a plot to hijack an Aeroflot aircraft from Bangkok and crash it into Singapore’s Changi International Airport. Mohammad Hasan bin Sayanudin, alias Fajar Taslim, was testifying against two other terrorist suspects. All three are charged with killing a Christian high school teacher in South Sumatra province during 2007. They are also charged with plotting to kill two Catholic priests in 2005 and to carry out a bombing of a café in West Sumatra. According to Sayanudin, those who were part of...

Now that the Obama administration is reconsidering California's plan to increase the fuel economy of cars sold in the Golden State and 13 others to 35 miles per gallon by 2016, we wondered how close the automakers are to getting there.

As Barack Obama takes office today, some fear forging new energy policy has faded into the background as pulling the U.S. out of recession has become top priority. “Some people in Washington are talking about taking the energy issue off the table,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, warned the American Jewish Committee in Houston last week. “If we don’t plan now, we will be right back in the same situation.” Here are three areas energy experts say are ripe for immediate attention, and positions Obama has taken: GREEN BUILDING Buildings account for more carbon emissions than vehicles, according to the...

Why is it no one in the orbits of Congress ever says, you know( imitating Caroline Kennedy here) why don't we just do away with the idiotic CAFE rules and while we are at it, why not dump the equally stupid 'gasoline blends' crappola? Don't you think any blithering idiot can figure out how much they can afford to pay for a car and the fuel to run it? I would also suggest that any first year engineering student could advise you that trying to get that last one percent out of the air pollution equation is going to be...

(AP) Mexico City - Salim Boughader Mucharrafille was arrested in 2002 and convicted on organized-crime and immigrant-smuggling charges. Boughader, a Mexican of Lebanese descent, ran a cafe in the city of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, California.

Report: Cafe bomber confesses to bus bombing Yesterday ~ Chris ~ Link ~ Comments (13) According to Chinese media reports, Kunming police have stated that the man involved in yesterday's bombing at Salvador's Coffee House confessed to involvement in the unsolved July bus bombings shortly before dying. Kunming police told the Yunnan Info Daily that yesterday's blast was not due to a natural gas canister explosion - as had been reported earlier by some Chinese media - but rather ammonium nitrate, the same compound which was reportedly used in the bus bombings this summer. Police said the ammonium nitrate had...

"CAFE has to be the most perverse exercise in product regulation in industrial history." So wrote Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in the Wall Street Journal last week. "Look at the gallons consumed, miles driven, barrels imported or emissions emitted: CAFE has had no significant impact on energy consumption. Its sole practical effect has been to inflict on Detroit the need to produce, with high-cost U.S. labor, millions of small cars designed to lose money." Couldn't have said it better myself.

Mumbai: At least 15 people have been injured in gunfights between two groups in at least three places in Mumbai on Thursday night. Details are sketchy but it is believed that two gangs fired at each other at outside CST Railway Terminus, Hotel Oberoi and the popular Café Leopold restaurant in Mumbai. The first shooting took place near the CST police station

WASHINGTON --- In a major win for environmentalists, a committee of House Democratic leaders on Wednesday voted to put Rep. Henry Waxman in charge of a key panel that will have oversight over global warming issues in the new Congress. The House Steering committee voted 25-22 to put the California Democrat in charge of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, replacing Michigan Democratic Rep. John Dingell, the most senior member in the House. The House Democratic caucus will vote on Thursday. The Waxman-Dingell battle has been closely watched on Capitol Hill. Waxman is regarded as an ally of environmentalists while...

Word around Detroit is GM and the EPA are apparently duking it out over the Chevy Volt. The problem is this: Is the Volt an electric car or a hybrid? How you define the Volt is important, because it dictates how the official EPA fuel-economy numbers will be calculated.

McCain and Obama came to Michigan this week touting two all-too-similar energy plans. By Henry Payne Detroit — The presidential fuel follies came careening into Michigan this week, advertising two knights battling over America’s energy future. Upon closer inspection, however, the fix appears to be in: Underneath the rhetorical weaponry, both knights are wearing the same green armor. Barack Obama arrived first at Michigan State to give a typically grandiose speech outlining his plan for a “complete transformation of our economy.” The Arrogant One has been trying to make up to Michigan since he presumed a year ago to tell...