62 mpg by 2025? Environmental Groups Begin New CAFE Push

Ready to give up on imported oil and bring gas prices down? Leaders from four environmental groups are relying on American drivers’ desire to keep gas prices low and demands that cars and trucks sip gas in order to call for a 62 mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard for 2025. This is the 6-percent rule that would require automakers to increase their CAFE numbers by that much each year, after the current standard raises CAFE to 35.5 mpg by 2016.

Of course, CAFE numbers represent some sort of new math we never learned in school.

“There’s a big difference” between the CAFE standard and the actual window sticker number, says Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. True enough, and Knobloch says a 62 mpg standard equals about 44 mpg on your average car’s window sticker. Environment America Executive Director Margie Alt, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune and Republicans for Environmental Protection President Rob Sisson joined Knobloch in supporting the 62-mpg rule Monday.

Nevertheless, that number means that save a huge breakthrough in some sort of alternative fuel, the U.S. fleet will have to consist of a substantial number of electrified and plug-in cars and trucks 14 years from now. Technical advancements in the good old internal combustion engine will bring up the bottom of each automaker’s CAFE numbers.

The necessary technology will raise new vehicle prices by an average of $9,970, Sean McAlinden, the Center for Automotive Research’s chief economist and executive veep, told Automotive News. Other estimates are much lower; as low as $3,500 according to federal agencies, and the Sierra Club’s Brune says the average driver would save up to $7,500 at the pump over the lifetime of the vehicle. Environment America’s Margie Alt said that a 60-mpg car would save the average driver “$513 at the gas pump this summer alone.”

Sisson, the Republicans for Environmental Protection president, says he recently drove a Ford C-Max with his family on vacation in Europe and found it “fun to drive” while returning 47 mpg. Must have been a diesel, though I didn’t get to ask him this follow-up question. I didn’t get a chance to ask him, too, whether his group has any other members.

“My job is to kind of remind [my party] that conservation is a Republican value,” he says.

Fair enough. As a Republican from Michigan, Sisson is proud to note that Michigan Republican Gerald Ford launched CAFE standards during his short presidency.

I’d like to note that Sisson’s 47-mpg Ford mini-minivan is the result of serious fuel taxes in Europe, not a CAFE standard, though the European Union’s more recent CO2 standards are effectively fuel mileage standards in reverse.

Today’s clean diesel technology is as costly as hybrid technology, so 2025’s new car buyers will get no breaks there. Keep in mind, too, that the only reason any light vehicles are sold with diesels in the U.S. is because oil companies had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into providing ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel with levels nearly as low as Europe’s. I expect their vast, highly funded lobbying efforts will surpass anything the auto industry can mount against the new standard. President Obama is expected to announce his proposal for 2017-25 standards this fall.

And what about upstream pollution from plug-in hybrids? Brune answered my phone conference question by saying that the Sierra Club expects one-third of the nation’s coal-fired powerplants to close down by 2016 or ’17. I couldn’t make out much of his comments because he had a bad phone connection, but sourcewatch.com says the Energy Information Administration counted 614 coal-fired powerplants in the U.S. in 2004. We’ll still have some 400 coal-fired plants, an average of eight per state.

Clean as a Chevrolet Volt, Nissan Leaf or plug-in Toyota Prius’ exhaust pipe might be, the more impassioned environmentalists always will complain about upstream CO2.

There are no easy solutions. A more moderate 2025 CAFE proposal would raise the number 3 percent per year after 2016, to 47 mpg by 2025. Whatever happens, the automakers and Obama both want a single, national standard.

The California Air Resources Board likes to set its own standards. Though it can’t set fuel economy standards, like the EU it does so in the reverse by setting greenhouse gas standards. Thirteen other, mostly high-population states on the East Coast and in the West follow CARB, which in effect usurps the national standard. You can bet a tank full of premium that CARB will mimic the environmentalists, and push for the equivalent of 62 mpg by ’25.

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