U.S. Senate Reaches Fuel Efficiency Compromise

[syth82]

It's very interesing how most of the posters who thought this was a step in the right direction had reasoned responses to it, and most who disagree with it said "politicians is dum" or something along those lines.
Personally i believe it is not an unreasonable goal, however it's the wrong goal. It makes more sense to me to hike gas taxes significantly and use those funds for grants for development of alternatives to oil dependency. However as someone else stated, that would likely lead to riots. Probally mostly lower class white males (we'll call them rednecks) with rusty Dodge pickups screaming "politicians is dum!"

[PhishPhood]

Originally Posted by Todd M

Were the laws of supply and demand repealed in your state? Of course more consumption will occur. If you made all cars 300MPG, the price of gas would drop and alternative uses would pop up.

An extreme and unrealistic example. Use reality. Vehicles become twice as efficient, i.e. they use half the fuel. Normally as you imply the laws of supply and demand would indicate that the price of fuel should go down.

What happens if the supply of oil also decreases..
a) because oil is a finite quantity and all the easy oil has been found;
b) we are in competition for existing supplies with two giants that never existed before, both of which dwarf us;
c) a good part of the world that controls production of oil dislikes us very very much;
d) there are more of us ( 30% increase in population coming ) driving, thus we end up bidding the supply of oil away from our fellow citizens.

To put this into perspective these new CAFE standards only look to reduce petroleum consumption by one third.

You might even heat your home with it. You are assuming a constant number of vehicles and no changes in consumer habits. We continue to live further from our jobs because land is cheaper out of town. Vehicles that use less per gallon will only continue to encourage this trend. If your goal is to reduce consumption, tax that which you want to reduce. Just look at cigarette sales. They have been dropping as the taxes go up. I don't believe that is smart either, but it is the way to reduce gas consumption.

No actually I'm trying to allow for a 30% increase in the population and many many more drivers all now competing against you and me for the same gasoline in the fuel tanks. In the decade of the 20's there will be 30% more of us driving and probably driving some longer distances as you note. If we haven't found 30% more oil by then and put it into the pumps there will be fights in the streets and gun battles between motorists to get that last tankful. The main problem with this is that there isn't 30% more 'easy' oil to find. It's located in hard-to-find, hard-to-process reserves. And even if we did find it the two Asian giants are likely to bid the extra away from us so we'll never see it.

So now we're back to the same oil we have now...but with 30% more drivers going longer distances. The VMT study brought to light here in another thread estimated that our own fuel consumption wouldn't be +30% in the 20's, it would be 60% higher.

Here is how this works out using 2007 technology. You are one of a hundred people who have a 15 mpg truck that fills up with ~24 gal. You can do it every day if you like right now....2400 gallonsfor all 100 of you. But if you had to share this with 160 people who had 15 mpg trucks you could only get 15 gallons for your truck. At 24 gal you can drive 360 miles. At 15 gal you can only drive 225 miles. You have to play nice.

Oh just to rub salt in your wounds a little.... the oil companies will react to supply and demand and charge you $8/gal to get your 15 gal allotment instead of a measly $3/gal for your 24 gal now.

By-the-way, if we taxed it, it would reduce our consumption, but would put us at a further productivity disadvantage with any other country that chose not to tax their citizens in this fashion. In other words, I have no doubt that the Chinese would love for us to hamstring our economy this way. More cheap fuel for them.

Agreed I think this is the worst solution.