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weeks, as the debate over federal fuel-economy standards has moved
closer to the Senate floor, environmentalists have claimed overwhelming
public support for higher standards. They tout polls showing that
60, 80, perhaps even 200 percent of Americans favor laws to boost
the mile-per-gallon capabilities of new vehicles. But a
poll released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute on February
25 shows that a strong plurality (48 percent) actually opposes such
an increase.
Why the difference?
Our poll claimed that this program, known as CAFE (Corporate Average
Fuel Economy), kills people. The other polls didn't.
We received
many irate e-mails complaining that we had used a distorted, highly
biased piece of disinformation aimed at producing precisely the
result we wanted. Those complaints would be justified if CAFE's
lethal effects were a poorly supported hypothesis. But the evidence
on this issue comes from no less a body than the National Academy
of Sciences, which issued a report last August finding that CAFE
contributes to between 1,300 and 2,600 traffic deaths per year.
Given that this program has been in effect for more than two decades,
its cumulative toll is staggering.
CAFE has this
impact on safety because it restricts the production of large cars.
Large cars are less fuel efficient than smaller, similarly equipped
vehicles, but they are also more crashworthy in practically every
type of accident. The first major analysis of this issue came in
a 1989 report from researchers at Harvard and the Brookings Institution;
since then, a number of other analyses, by government and private
researchers, have confirmed the conclusion that CAFE kills. There
are dissenters on this point, but they are exactly that.
Yet not a single
proponent of CAFE admits that it kills anyone. It's not as if they
dispute the numbers of deaths, or argue that CAFE's lethal toll
is a necessary price to pay for some other objective. Instead, they
simply claim that CAFE creates a win-win situation for everyone
— consumers, the auto industry, the environment, and, in the
wake of 9/11, even national security.
Proponents
of higher CAFE standards offer three basic arguments for their claim
that CAFE is risk-free. The first argument is that new technologies
can give us higher fuel economy and more safety, and so therefore
there is no trade-off. But try this thought experiment: Imagine
a high-tech car with incredibly advanced engines and equally great
safety systems. Now add a few additional cubic feet and a few additional
pounds to the car, so that it's a little bit bigger and a little
heavier. Two things will happen. This high-tech car has become a
bit safer, but also a bit less fuel-efficient. That is, you still
have a tradeoff between fuel economy and safety.
In short, high
technology doesn't get you out of the CAFE/safety bind. In the words
of Dr. Leonard Evans, president of the International Traffic Medicine
Association, this argument is like a tobacco-industry executive
saying that smoking doesn't endanger your health, because with everything
we now know about diets and exercising, you can smoke and still
be as healthy as a non-smoker.
It is true
that, with current knowledge about keeping fit, smokers can be healthier.
But this knowledge can make a nonsmoker even healthier yet. If you
smoke, you're going to be taking a risk no matter what.
The second
argument is based on the steadily declining fatality rate in cars.
Since the 1970's, when CAFE was enacted, that death rate has improved
even though cars have been downsized. How, then, can CAFE's downsizing
effect be making cars less safe when the death rate has been steadily
improving?
But in fact
the vehicle death rate has been improving not just since CAFE was
enacted, but for most of the past century. That steady improvement
has nothing to do downsizing; in fact, in the absence of downsizing
it would have improved even more. By analogy, consider the fact
that in 1970 we had zero cases of AIDS, but now we have tens of
thousands. Yet longevity in the U.S. today is about ten months greater
than it was in 1970. Does that allow us to say that AIDS is not
a health threat?
The last argument
they use is that CAFE cannot be deadly because it's endorsed by
such auto safety activists as Ralph Nader, Joan Claybrook, and Clarence
Ditlow. In fact, they do endorse higher CAFE standards. But years
ago, these very same people stated very forthrightly that larger
cars are safer cars. In 1972, for example, Nader and Ditlow published
a book called Small on Safety, a critique of the Volkswagen
Beetle. Page after page has such statements as: "Small size
and light weight impose inherent limitations on the degree of safety
that can be built into a vehicle."
In January,
Joan Claybrook appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee with
a diatribe on how the CAFE-safety tradeoff was a myth propagated
by industry. But in 1977 she appeared before that same committee
and stated, "There are going to be tradeoffs."
What happened?
Back then, large cars were not politically incorrect. Today they
are. For these people, the line all along has been: You want more
safety? You need more government. But with CAFE it's exactly the
opposite — more regulation means less safety. Their response
has been to choose the former over the latter.
There is not
a single advocate of CAFE who admits that it kills anyone. For this
reason, the CAFE debate is fundamentally dishonest. CAFE is often
portrayed as a way to keep us out of "blood-for-oil" wars,
but at least those wars have clear life-and-death risks. CAFE, on
the other hand, is itself a blood-for-oil war, waged on American
civilians by proponents who refuse to admit it carries any risks
at all.
Public knowledge
of those risks can change the CAFE debate. In our poll we found
that, given a general description of CAFE (with no mention of safety),
the program is supported by 61 percent of the public, and opposed
by only 22 percent. Once the National Academy's findings were described,
however, support dropped to 42 percent, while opposition rose to
39 percent. More importantly, on the issue that's currently in play
— whether to make CAFE even more stringent — 48 percent
opposed such changes, while only 43 percent supported them.
Deregulation
is often caricatured as a money-saving maneuver that puts innocent
lives at risk. With CAFE, it's exactly the opposite. It's rare for
the lethal effects of more regulation to be so well documented and
to involve such life-and-death stakes. If the Senate agrees to more
stringent fuel-economy standards, we'll have to wonder what, if
any, deregulatory battles can still be won.
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