Someone’s in the Kitchen with Cheney…So What Are They Cooking Up?

We all know from hard experience that anytime you see the words Cheney, back room, and CEO in one sentence, it has to be bad. So it’s really not welcome news at all to learn that Vice President Dick Cheney recently met with the CEOs of various auto manufacturers behind closed doors to discuss impending fuel economy standards.

You might have heard that these administration shenanigans are about to come to an end, because the Senate passed a bill this summer for fuel economy that Congress might soon pass in the final version of the energy bill. Although the Senate bill is praised as raising fuel economy for the combined car and truck fleet to 35 mpg by 2020, it actually would merely set a target of 35 mpg with a significant loophole: The administration could set lower standards if it manufactures a cost-benefit analysis justifying a lower standard.

And that means Cheney’s meeting with the auto execs can’t be good news. Either they were hatching plans to weaken pending legislation even further, or they were planning what to do if the Senate language becomes law. And either way, Detroit wins while the public loses.

These meetings are far from the first. Public Citizen recently exposed a series of meetings from 2001 to 2003 between members of Cheney’s office and other high-level Bush officials, in which the Department of Transportation was bullied into proposing a radical new structure for fuel economy policy that erodes the benefits of fuel economy.

At stake is how fuel economy standards will be applied to vehicles. Currently, the agency uses a corporate average model: All manufacturers are given one fuel economy standard, and the fuel economy performance of each manufacturer’s fleet must average out to reach that standard. (So if you make a gas-guzzler, you have to balance it out with fuel efficient vehicles … and the result is that consumers have real options.) A technical obstacle in the original fuel economy law (a legislative veto provision) has been a roadblock to any increases in the standards since the mid-1980s, and some well-meaning Republicans (yep, Republicans) tried unsuccessfully in the 109th Congress to just remove it and let the administration set higher standards.

Instead of asking Congress to remove that obstacle, Cheney’s staff and the White House pushed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to propose replacing the corporate average model with a complex “sliding scale” that sets varying fuel economy standards based on the size of a vehicle. Larger automobiles end up with less stringent fuel economy standards, creating an incentive for manufacturers to build highway behemoths.

Lo and behold, the Senate bill that sets a toothless target also would mandate the adoption of the Cheney scale for all vehicles, not just light trucks. Which means the end of fuel economy as we know it, to be replaced by fuel economy as envisioned by Cheney. And a policy intended to wean us off our dangerous addiction to foreign oil will be distorted in ways that will keep us hooked for years to come.