In the News: Obama, California, tailpipes, and seals

There are a lot of great news articles about this, including the New York Times one - by the way, I’ll admit my bias here and now and say that I get most of my news from the NYT – but I’ll do my super-quick summary for you here.

Basically, California wants to more strictly regulate tailpipe emissions, which is currently the domain of the federal government for all states, unless they have a waiver. The waiver allows the state regulations to be stronger than the federal regulations. California has had a waiver for a long time, but they want to increase their standards again. Of course, this is bringing up a lot of the same, tired, arguments about how this will kill the industry and cause Detroit to explode and set Canada on fire. Or that there will be some sort of evil mutant hodgepodge of state regulations, and the automakers will be really confused. So confused, in fact, that they claim they will explode and set baby seals on fire. And go out of business. But mostly incinerate seals.

This is a pretty stupid argument, in my opinion. Business, as those type-A personalities who become businesspeople will be happy to tell you, is about natural selection. Adapt or die! Corporate raiders! Hostile takeover!!!! It’s a rough business, business. And it has become abundantly clear that the big three need to get their ducks (not the Catera ducks!) in a row and shape up. All of them make small, efficient cars in Europe, and sell them like crazy. Ford is working on turbocharging smaller engines so that power-hungry Americans can still pass big trucks on the freeway while getting ok fuel economy when off-boost. Great! That’s fantastic. It’s been proven that you can make cars that burn less gas and emit less pollutants. Start building them!

In any event, Obama is ordering his minions to make sure they reconsider granting California’s proposed waiver, which is a shift away from the Bush policy. In case you can’t guess, I’m all in favor of it.