Is there more to Shrub than we realised?
Now, on this blog we are very critical of George W Bush, and for good reason as Bush has been the number one obstacle to real action to reduce greenhouse emissions and protect the planet from out of control human induced climate change. But what about this passage from his speechwriter David Frum’s book The Right Man (from an interesting article by John Lanchester in London Review of Books in March):
I once made the mistake of suggesting to Bush that he use the phrase cheap energy to describe the aims of his energy policy. He gave me a sharp, squinting look, as if he were trying to decide whether I was the stupidest person he’d heard from all day or only one of the top five. Cheap energy, he answered, was how we had got into this mess. Every year from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s, American cars burned less and less oil per mile travelled. Then in about 1995 that progress stopped. Why? He answered his own question: because of the gas-guzzling SUV. And what had made the SUV possible? This time I answered. ‘Um, cheap energy?’ He nodded at me. Dismissed.
Bush’s ranch uses geothermal heatpumps. Is the man a conscious agent of the oil industry and goes to war for access to cheap oil in Iraq while underneath he actually understands some of the issues?
I like some of the lines in Lanchester’s article like when, regarding climate change, he parapharases the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci: “Never before have we, on a planetary scale, so needed to combine pessimism of the intellect with optimism of the will.”
And this one: “The government is dedicating £3.6 billion to widening the M1, seven times what it is spending ‘on spending policies that tackle climate change’ – and if that last piece of ministerial wording fails to set off your bullshit detector, it’s time to get the battery checked.”
And for those of you keen on the nuclear option, Lanchester throws his lot in with Lovelock on the nuclear option. Fortunately it is irrelevant to NZ.
July 25th, 2007 at 2:12 am
The belief that George W. has been the number one obstacle to real action to reduce greenhouse emissions and protect the planet from out of control human induced climate change has never really been consistent with what has actually been happening in congress over the last twenty years. I suspect this is similar to the portrayal of Bush as stupid simply because he often used the wrong words in press conferences. In fact this is common characteristic of highly intelligent people in noisy interview situations. Its similar to the way racing engines hesitate and misfire when driven at legal speeds.
Between 1994 and 2001 congress prohibited NHTSA from spending any money on a review of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. As a result the SUV boom continued unabated. The Clinton Administration supported greater fuel efficiency, but indicated in 1993 that an increase in the CAFE standards was not the option likeliest to be embraced first. This was the same administration that originally vetoed signing the Kyoto protocol.
Lobbying by car makers prevented Congress from agreeing to actually do anything to improve the CAFE standards, which had been unchanged since 1986. In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush outlined a goal of reducing gasoline consumption by 20% from projected levels in 2017. One of the key initiatives to achieve this goal is improved CAFE standards with SUVs classified as passenger cars instead of light trucks.
As a former Governor of Texas George W. must be intimately familiar with the effects of peak oil as his state has already experienced it.
Perhaps he was smart enough to realise that Kyoto is too little too late and that his fellow Americans wouldn’t willingly give up their SUVs to save the rest of the world. So he went to extremes in the other direction so that the conservation measures rejected as extreme in the 1990s would now be accepted as a moderate alternative. Threatening to extract oil from the Alaskan wildlife refuge was the master stroke. The warped sense of values in the US make Alaskan wildlife more important than foriegn humans. If that was his intention then he deserves a pat on the back for getting Americans to accept real solutions to climate change without having to be convinced that climate change is real. Would the bad Bush really have kicked GM and Ford when they are on the knees and given their jobs to foreign car makers?
See why GM and Ford were so keen to stop the CAFE standards from being changed
http://www.nhtsa.gov/portal/site/nhtsa/menuitem.43ac99aefa80569eea5752 9cdba046a0/
July 25th, 2007 at 9:06 am
What a good idea, reclassify SUV’s as light trucks…. The head of the IEA is saying that sort of thing.
Interesting post (for once) Frog. It always seemed to me that George Bush was partly media myth. We really need to go after the sods in industry who tie(?) the politicians hands. Eg Beer Wine and Spirits lobbyist had her own parlimentary pass with photo, until stopped by Matt Robson……..
jh
Time to email David Parker Minister of Energy Depletion
mailto:
David.Parker@ministers.govt.nz
July 25th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
my idea fwwog is that new clear energy,
it works fwwog, heat and energy clean,
but then,
and assuming the americazn can actually fly to the monn,
and we put the waste on the moon,
i mean fwwog that better than south dakota,
otherwise youas just better join NAT
currency flying now dudes,
July 25th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
US currency cratering now dude… watch Kiwi vs Aussie not vs US$
NZ needs to alter terms of trade to use something other than US$ for settlment.
BJ
July 25th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Bush is a smart operator, but it seems he is just the latest spokesman for the club who rule that country. Read http://www.dunwalke.com/ for an eye opener on how their government runs.
Scary stuff if it’s true… Wonder if it’s the same here (hope not!)
July 25th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
# jh Says:
July 25th, 2007 at 9:06 am
> What a good idea, reclassify SUV’s as light trucks…. The head of the IEA is saying that sort of thing.
In the US, SUVs always have been classified as light trucks. This gives them an unfair market advantage over cars, in that a vehicle bought for business use incurs GST if it is a car, but not if it is a truck. This means that a real estate agent, accountant, or any other self-employed person who doesn’t need a truck for work can often get an SUV more cheaply than a car, when the SUV is more expensive to build, just because they don’t pay GST on the SUV.
This rule was introduced to help people like builders and drainlayers, who really do need light trucks for work. But Bush II increased the loopholes in it, so more white-collar workers could take advantage of it. The BMW X5, Porsche Cayenne and Mercedes ML series all weigh the same amount, which just happens to be the least a truck can weigh in the US without being classed as a car, and therefore incur GST. It has been suggested that he did this to protect the US motor industry, because US-made SUVs are not as inferior to Japanese SUVs as US cars are to Japanese cars.
Classifying SUVs as trucks might be logical, but not under a tax system that gives trucks an advantage over cars.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:40 am
kahikatea, jh has the idea back to front. The intention was to essentially reclassify SUVs as passenger cars but this hasn’t quite happened yet.
Congress has done things in the typically convoluted way of politicians. In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences reviewed all aspects of the CAFE system and recommended some major changes. In 2003 Congress authorised NHTSA to develop and implement a new CAFE system for light trucks and vans but not for passenger cars. This year Congress authorised NHTSA to extend the new system to passenger cars. This four year delay has meant that SUV mpg standards have caught up with passenger cars of the same size. From now on they should improve at the same rate which removes one of the major profit factors that favoured SUVs.
The reformed CAFE system for light trucks takes into account the number of seats and not just the type of chassis. Under the old system SUVs were classified as light trucks simply because they had light truck chassis. Likewise MPVs were classified as vans if they had a van chassis.
The decision to have different CAFE standards for cars and LTVs was made in the 1970s for the reasons you gave. Over the next decade Chrysler created MPVs and SUVs to both meet customer demand for big station wagons and to take advantage the CAFE system. Essentially they could sell big “cars” and not be penalised for not achieving the car CAFE minimum MPG.
July 26th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
San Francisco have just banned all vehicles which weigh over 2700kg from the city. Apparently they were destroying the roads as they are too heavy…
July 26th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
8. Roman Says:
July 26th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
> San Francisco have just banned all vehicles which weigh over 2700kg from the city. Apparently they were destroying the roads as they are too heavy…
This superficially sounds like a great idea, but if taken literally it would mean no firefighting trucks, which is clearly a safety problem. There may also be an issue with construction cranes. I presume they have an exception, at least for the fire trucks…
July 26th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
‘San Francisco have just banned all vehicles which weigh over 2700kg from the city. Apparently they were destroying the roads as they are too heavy…’
Interesting.
One of the big causes of the economic revolution in England from 1760 on was that they went from having a medeival road system that was a joke, to having highways you could really travel on.
The key to that was the turnpike trusts, who maintained the roads and charged you to use them. The turnpikes could say “sure you can use heavy narrow-wheeled carriages that rip up the roads - but we’ll charge you a toll three times as much as anyone else”. So people didn’t. So road maintenance got cheaper.
It was a nice example of the govt taking what was a market externality (the way some types of carriages ruined the roads) and re-arranging things so as to put a price on it.
(and don’t dis the the industrial revolution - it was England’s move from the famine-ridden 3rd-world poverty of the peasant economy to the still-imperfect-but-better-than-that modern economy. Dickensian England sucked, but a lot less people starved and froze to death and they managed to achieve ‘luxuries’ like literacy for the masses that the peasant economy could not. Yes, we can move to a post-industrial economy that will be better, but you had to start at the start.)
July 27th, 2007 at 1:37 am
Roman, Where did you get the info on the SF SUV ban? I searched most of the SF green and car-free sites and none mention this. The nearest I could find was this “The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn’t seem to know it.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2104755/
July 27th, 2007 at 11:44 am
uk_kiwi
This is more scary I think.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0303/S00080.htm