Sticker Shock
Lots of happy talk accompanied the Obama administration’s unveiling of new fuel economy stickers for cars and light trucks that will include annual fuel costs and information about emissions. The new stickers, mandatory starting with the 2013 models, are a big improvement on the simple miles-per-gallon estimates on the present label. If they were there right now, we suspect many car buyers would be experiencing a new sort of sticker shock.
Consider a new midsize Ford Fusion S model. At $4-a-gallon gas, annual fuel costs would be about $2,200 for 15,000 miles driven. The car emits about 250 grams of greenhouse gases per mile; the new sticker would give it a 6 greenhouse gas rating on a scale of 1 to 10. And that’s for a car with a rated mileage of 34.9 m.p.g. (actual highway mileage, as with all vehicles, is lower, in this case about 27 m.p.g.). Industry clearly needs to do better.
Labels can help consumers make better choices. But Detroit and other manufacturers make big changes only when regulators force them to.
President Obama now has a chance to press for those changes. His advisers are in the final stages of drawing up new fuel economy and emissions standards for vehicles produced between 2017 and 2025. One advocate of tougher standards, Brendan Bell of the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls it “the biggest decision the president is making this summer that no one knows about.”
Mr. Obama has said he will recommend strong standards, but industry and many in Congress are furiously lobbying for the weakest they can get away with.
Last year, the administration put four proposals on the table. The most conservative, which industry prefers, calls for an average annual fuel efficiency increase of 3 percent, which works out to a fleetwide average of 47 m.p.g. by 2025. The most ambitious scenario, favored by environmental and consumer groups, calls for average annual gains of 6 percent, which works out to 62 m.p.g. in the same time frame.
Mr. Obama should hang tough. Given the vanishingly small prospects for serious energy legislation on Capitol Hill, the new standards represent his and the country’s most promising opportunity to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and America’s dependence on foreign oil.
The president has a strong track record. The fuel economy agreement he negotiated in 2009 raised fleetwide fuel economy standards to 34.1 m.p.g. by 2016 — a 40 percent improvement on standards that had not changed much in 30 years. In addition to significant reductions in pollution, that agreement is expected to save 1.6 million barrels of oil a day, roughly the amount produced in the Gulf of Mexico.
Mr. Obama now needs to push automakers to do even better. Technological improvements will be necessary to reach any credible new standards — more gas-electric hybrids, more all-electric vehicles, better batteries, lighter body materials. But the basic technology is there.
Industry says cars will cost more. Federal studies say the most aggressive plan — 62 m.p.g. — would add $2,800 to $3,500 to the price of a car. They also show that the improved technology could deliver as much as $9,700 in reduced gasoline bills over the life of the car. That sounds like a good deal for consumers, and the environment.
John Edwards, A Cautionary Tale
Self-destruction in politics is painful to watch for voters whose hopes are stirred time and again by the high promises of a compelling candidate. The case of former Senator John Edwards is especially tawdry and disturbing. He was criminally indicted on Friday on charges of misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations to keep his mistress and their baby a secret while he pursued the White House in 2008 and protected “his public image as a devoted family man.”
Mr. Edwards insists he is innocent: “I did not break the law,” he said on Friday. His lawyers say the $925,000 at issue was an entirely legal gift from two supporters designed to keep the truth not from voters, but from Mr. Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, who died of cancer in December.
Either way, it is a sad truth being contested in federal court in Raleigh, N.C. Mr. Edwards could be acquitted, especially considering the fragile state of campaign laws in the frenzied world of big-money American politics. But the woeful courtroom coda to his once flourishing political career can only invite a further slide toward wariness and cynicism for American voters.
Until he became his own nemesis, Mr. Edwards had a storybook career. In 2004, as a freshman senator, he was chosen by John Kerry as his vice presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket. His campaign tales of hardscrabble roots and his populist idealizing were compelling, as were his wife’s political smarts, charm and personal struggle.
All of that made his fall in 2008 all the steeper as he was caught in a cascade of denials and lies and forced to confirm the scandal. Whatever happens with his case, Mr. Edwards has provided American politics and voters with the last thing the nation needs: another cautionary tale of hubris when honesty is the only acceptable option.
Overlooking Oversight
In late May, Congress extended three enhanced surveillance powers that were granted to the government after the 9/11 attacks — two in the Patriot Act and one from a related intelligence law. In doing so, lawmakers neatly managed to avoid any lapse in those powers. They failed miserably in their duty to carefully re-examine the provisions, trim back excesses, and add safeguards to protect civil liberties. In other words, they ignored the whole point of requiring that the provisions be periodically reviewed.
One of the renewed provisions permits a roving wiretap on terrorism suspects who switch phone numbers or providers. While this is a useful tool, the lax rules for specifying who is the subject of the wiretap could invite abuse. Another provision permits the government to examine library, bookstore and business records without having to show that the material is related to a terrorism investigation.
The third overly broad provision allows surveillance of “lone wolf” suspects with no known ties to a foreign power or recognized terror groups. It has never been used, but the low threshold for doing so is concerning.
These powers were extended for four more years, with no changes, under a deal struck between the Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and Republican leaders headed by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the House speaker, John Boehner. They brushed aside objections from an unusual coalition of Tea Party activists, liberals and centrists from both parties.
Four years is better than the permanent extension preferred by some Republicans. But it is still too long until the next renewal, given the succession of missed opportunities over almost a decade now to consider whether the goal of making America safer could be achieved with less sweeping surveillance powers.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, tried and failed to get a vote on a sensible amendment that would add several safeguards, most notably enhanced auditing and oversight of how the powers are being used. He also proposed an early sunsetting of “national security letters,” which the F.B.I. has used to obtain evidence without a court order, and which have been widely abused.
Mr. Leahy has resubmitted his amendment, which had strong bipartisan support in his committee, as a freestanding bill. Both chambers should vote on it promptly.
During the too-brief debate on the Patriot Act, two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, claimed that the Justice Department had secretly interpreted the Patriot Act to allow domestic surveillance activities that many members of Congress do not understand. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, needs to make good on a pledge of a prompt, serious review.
Drinking In the Draught of June
If we could bottle a few days to uncork later in the year — when the wind has got us by the neck and the curbs are full of taxi-slush — these would be the ones: early June, the days of peony and iris. Conifers still wear the green tips of new growth, and a few of the hardwoods, hickories especially, still show a last vestige of May. Otherwise, the trees have cast their pollen and fledged completely. Now come the deep, dark shadows of late summer.
In the city, the pigeons have passed the stage of courtship and settled into a beak-to-beak domesticity full of gratified cooing. The subway platforms are still temperate. In the country, the cool, dry nights are completely silent, none of August’s night-rasp. At twilight, the swallows go off watch, and on come the bats. In the dimness you can still make out bumblebees flying bottom-heavy from blossom to blossom. The fireflies have not yet lit up.
Best of all, the day is still growing in length, the solstice still a couple of weeks away. This is the particular poignancy of June. So much has gone by already — fruit blossoms, daffodils, tulips and lilacs — and yet everything feels so young, even as we come to the turning point in the calendar of light, the moment when the year starts waning again. It feels absurdly unsynchronized, and yet it is synchronicity itself.
It would be nice to decant some early June whenever you needed to, when the sun hasn’t shone in days, when the temperature reaches triple digits, whenever the weather or anything else gets you down. But all we can do is drink in June while the month is upon us, while the peonies are coming into bloom.
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