President Bush on Monday announced further government interference in the auto market to address U.S. gas consumption. One only needs to look at the current run-up in gas prices to see how government meddling only exacerbates gas market problems.

A combination of expensive federal regulations and NIMBY concerns means no new oil refineries have been built in the last 30 years even as fuel consumption has increased 20 percent. Worse, as engineer/writer Pat Bedard explains here, engine advances have made federal mandates that refineries change over to seasonably “cleaner” fuel mixes irrelevant:

“This was a scheme dating back to the carburetor era that mandated gasoline contain two-percent oxygen by weight, so as to trick the fuel system into serving up leaner mixtures. It applied in localities with air-quality problems according to the Environmental Protection Agency . . . . MTBE was the first choice of oxygenates, but since it contributed to ground-water contamination, ethanol became the fallback. However, feedback-fuel-metering systems, which self-adjust to operate at a fixed mixture regardless of fuel composition, became the norm roughly 20 years ago. As a result, the benefits of the oxygenate rule have decreased as newer vehicles’ fuel systems have replaced the older, more primitive ones. Today, as any engine engineer will testify, the rule has virtually no pollution benefit and has become nothing more than a backdoor mandate for the ethanol industry and corn farmers.”

So there you have it. Because (like CAFÉ laws) oxygenate rules are back-door mandates, consumers have no idea that the fuel changeover that is vexing refineries and helping spike gas prices is no longer necessary.

Consumers are being had. But they blame the oil companies – a misperception the guilty pols are more than happy to encourage.