CAFE NOT ON THE MENU

Briefly, after Hurricane Katrina knocked out some of the Gulf Coast’s oil infrastructure, President Bush promoted energy conservation. Unfortunately, that newfound conservation appreciation was short-lived. With gas prices again hovering around $3 a gallon, the president’s solution centers largely on getting Americans to buy new cars – hybrids or ones that run on clean diesel, easing environmental regulations and investigating price gouging.

As he has for more than five years, the president this week avoided the one step that would drastically cut American oil use – requiring auto-makers to build vehicles that go

farther on a gallon of gas.

Transportation accounts for about 40 percent of oil U.S. consumption, so the president is right to focus on this area. However, hybrid vehicles and increasing ethanol use won’t dramatically cut oil use. The biggest problem is that carmakers have focused on making bigger and more powerful vehicles. The result is sport utility vehicles, cars and trucks that don’t get good gas mileage.

In a report last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded that if the 2005 vehicle fleet had the same distribution of performance and weight as did the 1987 fleet, a 24 percent increase in fuel economy would have resulted. Higher corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards would do much more long term than deriving fuel from switch grass to decrease dependence on oil, from foreign and domestic sources.

Maine’s senators understand this and have long advocated for higher fuel economy standards for American cars. Their efforts have not attracted enough support to become law. Faced with gas prices that show no signs of declining, that may change.

It is also a real solution, while increasing ethanol production – popular in agricultural states – is not. A recent study by researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley found that producing fuel from plant materials uses more oil or other fossil fuel than the amount of alternative fuel ultimately produced. Corn, the source of ethanol, requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, the study concluded.

Growing corn, for example, uses fossil fuels to produce fertilizer and pesticides, to run farm machinery, to transport the crop and to process it into ethanol. There are also costs

associated with government subsidies – include tax credits of 51 cents per gallon for ethanol, water pollution and soil deposition, although these were not included in the study.

In addition to touting ethanol, the president directed the EPA to waive rules requiring cleaner-burning automobile fuel in the most polluted areas of the country, including southern Maine. According to the agency’s own analysis, this won’t have much effect on gas prices. Neither will opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, which the president also called for in his speech, or extending the tax break for hybrid vehicles, some of which get worse gas mileage than conventional vehicles.

If the president were serious about lowing gas prices and America’s dependence on oil, rather than dithering around the edges, he’d take big steps. Requiring higher fuel economy standards would be a good place to start.