Deadly drive for auto regs.

ITEM: "America's energy policy has been broken for too long, and it's time we started fixing it," said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for June 21. "Motorists loudly complain about soaring gasoline prices but continue buying supersized vehicles with poor fuel efficiency." One solution, suggested the paper, is mandating better fuel efficiency with the energy bill before the Senate. "Despite protests from the auto industry and their congressional enablers, the bill could raise fuel efficiency standards for cars, SUVs and light trucks for the first time in decades."

ITEM: The New York Times for June 20 reported: "For a quarter-century, American automakers and their allies argued that any legislation to increase fuel economy standards would rob them of profits, force them to lay off workers and deprive consumers of the vehicles they wanted to buy." But, gloated the Times, "with a vote possible in the Senate on an energy plan, Detroit blinked, and the car companies retreated from their longstanding argument. They are now lobbying for a modest increase in mileage standards."

CORRECTION: Never mind that the Senate legislation mandating an increase in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard, if enacted into law, would drive up the price of vehicles; cut the effectiveness of work vehicles, such as pick-up trucks; cost untold manufacturing jobs; and lead to thousands of additional deaths on the highways.

More rules are needed, we are told, in order to wean us from dependence on foreign oil. This is an old lie in new garb. When CAFE was first foisted on the public in 1975, it was supposedly an answer to the OPEC oil embargo--yet today we are even more dependent on foreign oil. By 2002, fuel-economy statistics had improved by 114 percent for new autos and by 56 percent for new trucks since CAFE's introduction, but U.S. oil imports had jumped from 35 percent to 52 percent. By September 2006, foreign oil imports had risen as high as 70 percent.

Even if the fuel-efficiency rates do improve, that does not mean that less total fuel is consumed. In fact, as Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the Cato Institute have noted, "Environmentalists argue that increasing the miles per gallon of the cars we drive would save more energy than increased drilling could produce. But the data show that fuel consumption goes up whenever automobile fuel efficiency goes up. Nearly all the gains in fuel efficiency disappear once we account for the demonstrable increases in driving that such investments produce."

One brutal side effect is the number of additional deaths because of resultant smaller, and less safe, vehicles. A 2002 study by the National Research Council, for example, determined that such downsizing contributed to about 2,000 deaths every year. Multiply that by the years since 1975, and add in the current attempt to make the standards more stringent, and there is some real carnage involved.

Some consumers would like to make up their own minds when it comes to balancing safety and mileage numbers. Our masters in the Senate would rather do that thinking for us.