Tommy Denton

Recent columns

• Gifts for sharpening rhetorical swords
• Bush is feeding China's worst instincts
• Heroism in the face of stupidity, and worse
• Treating oil addiction with a dose of harm

• Column archive

President Bush said in his State of the Union address that Americans are "addicted to oil."

For years, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been told that remaining dependent upon foreign oil perpetuates dependence primarily on oil-rich but questionably reliable Middle East nations that continue to finance the seed beds that breed radicalized Islamists.

Yet significant numbers of Americans, like so many clammy-skinned, trembling-fingered junkies, roar to the mall in air-conditioned, four-wheel-drive behemoths that suck down petrol like a dehydrated camel at an Arabian oasis.

In the 16 years since the federal government last tinkered with vehicle mileage standards -- officially the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards -- consumption has proceeded apace, in part underwriting the proliferation of international jihadists and further deepening U.S. oil addiction.

Since 1990, the CAFE standards have stood at 27.5 miles per gallon for cars sold in the United States. A more recent law required "light" trucks to achieve 22.5 mph this year and improve to a muscular 24 by 2011.

Given the consequences of indirectly bankrolling terrorist cells through oil addiction, a dispassionate observer would reasonably conclude that only technology-challenged wimps would accept such standards in a common effort to preserve national security.

But, nooooo.

For nearly two decades, Congress has heeded the overtures -- and campaign contributions -- of the auto and energy industries and failed to reduce environmentally damaging carbon emissions and further strengthen national security through more rigorous energy efficiency.

Detroit insisted that imposing such standards would be not only cost-prohibitive but also unsafe. So the once-lucrative gas-guzzlers remained the manufacturers' marketing priority even in the post-9/11 escalation of energy prices -- to its current financial chagrin.

Along the way, the industry also has enjoyed the agreeable complicity of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been unamused by the slightest suggestion of resorting to what the Bush administration considers the tyranny of actual government regulation.

Consequently, the agency never has sought stronger efficiency standards for passenger vehicles, and its obedient minions proposed the wussy standards for "light" trucks.

Actually, wailing and gnashing of teeth by U.S. auto manufacturers about the prohibitive costs and safety implications of imposing higher efficiency standards met with blunt repudiation in a 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences.

The academy reported that car makers could produce mid-size cars averaging 41.3 mpg, minivans could average 36.6 mpg and increasingly large pickups could average 29.5 mpg within 10 to 15 years, even maintaining vehicle size and improving performance and safety. If achieved, that would produce a fleet average of 37 mpg.

That standard exceeds the 35 mpg proposed in legislation introduced by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., but significantly watered down with amendments after a full-court press by industry lobbyists.

The amended Feinstein bill, which last week cleared the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, represents a series of compromises that would reach the goal between 2011 and 2020, after which the standard would increase by 4 percent a year.

The mathematically problematic question of realistically achieving that aggressive annual 4 percent increase provides a suspiciously mischievous anticipation of the "need" for loopholes. One in particular -- exemption from the standards if the Transportation Department deems them economically harmful or not technologically feasible -- appears to be large enough to drive a convoy of Humvees through, especially in the hands of another administration in the future with neither heart nor stomach for enforcing national energy security.

Concern for bringing reasonable fuel-economy standards into play has aroused several states to compel the federal government to strengthen gas mileage mandates. Earlier this month, 10 states -- California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont -- sued the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its failure to use its authority under law to set standards "at the maximum feasible level" for sport utility vehicles and pickups.

For a country that consumes an atmosphere-damaging 20 million barrels of oil a day, with significant industrial sectors of the economy fighting to prevent congressional imposition of substantial fuel-economy standards, and with the U.S. oil addiction financing the logistical infrastructure of jihadists, the question presents itself:

Just whose side is our side on?

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.