Bush Fuel Economy Plan Rejected By The Courts
The Bush administrations fuel economy plan was rejected by 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Thursday. The court ruled that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "failed to address why the so-called light trucks are allowed to pollute more than passenger cars and didn't properly assess greenhouse gas emissions when it set new minimum miles-per-gallon requirements for models in 2008 to 2011," according to the Associated Press.
Oh no, someone has irritated Richard Blumenthal. Now their destruction is assured.
The court ordered the White House to examine why it continues to consider light trucks differently than cars. Regulators made a distinction between cars and light trucks decades ago when most trucks were used for commercial purposes.NHTSA had argued that it considered the intent of the manufacturer in making light trucks, rather than their actual highway use, in developing the new fuel standards.
"But this overlooks the fact that many light trucks today are manufactured primarily for transporting passengers," Fletcher wrote for the three-judge panel.
Fletcher also wrote that the administration failed to consider the benefit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"It did, however, include an analysis of the employment and sales impacts of more stringent standards on manufacturers," Fletcher wrote.
The court also took the administration to task for refusing to include in the new standards trucks weighing more than 8,500 pounds, a class that includes the Hummer H2, Ford F250 and other popular large vehicles.
The court ordered NHTSA to develop fuel standards for these large trucks or give a better reason than the agency's argument that it has never regulated those large trucks and that more testing needs to be done.
"This historic ruling vindicates our fight against fuel economy standards that are a complete sham and a gift to the auto industry," said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who also joined the lawsuit.
Court Rebukes Bush Fuel Economy Plan [AP]
(Photo:George E. Norkus)
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Comments:
Oh no, someone has irritated Richard Blumenthal. Now their destruction is assured.
Yeah, I bet the White House is shaking in their boots.
1. It was a stupid ruling
2. anyone who thinking humans are the primary reason for the world getting warmer needs their head examined
3. Thank god the 9th court gets over ruled more times than most people can count the stupid liberal ass court.
@Logan26:
Warming might be debatable but pollution and environmental damage due to pollution are irrefutable facts.
I am pretty sure over 8 billion wasteful organisms destroying the environment have some effect on the atmosphere and environment.
there is nothing to lose by having a cleaner environment and using resources more efficiently (unless you enjoy a wasteful life, care naught for other people and animals, or are a megacorp bent on pillaging the earth)
You know, I'll give a rats ass when the rest of the world starts going after countries who have 0 epa controls what so ever. China for starters.
Logan26: Go back to masturbating to Ann Coulter 'shops, troll.
I'm just glad they closed the damn Hummer loophole I've been complaining about for ~5 years now.
A couple things:
1. The "debatability" about global warming is like the debate about evolution. On one side you have the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community whose conclusions are founded on verifiable data and tested hypotheses. On the other, you have people who, while they may have strongly held opinions can't produce any evidence that supports their argument.
2. As for the other countries who have "0 epa controls", ask yourself this: Where did all of the CO2 already in the atmosphere come from? It came from us and our European forebears, who have enjoyed the benefits of an industrial economy for over 150 years. When we started burning massive amounts of coal most Chinese were still feudal peasantry. Doesn't it make sense that those who have enjoyed the 'benefits' of polluting the Earth should be the first ones to try and rectify the situation?
The entire global warming issue aside, gas is becoming a fought over commodity and rising demand is running the price up. We need to quit wasting so much gas as a country. The US automakers won't change unless forced.
The US automakers won't be forced by the US government to change their designs. Only consumer dollars can change that.
YES. Now please someone bring it home to mama!
Other's have said it better, so I'll just add my own point;
LAWL @ Logan26!
(BTW, was just plain "Logan" taken? Where are the other 25 Logans on Gawker?)
@Logan26: So its okay to pollute and be wasteful as long as everyone else is doing it? Great thinking!
Who do you think is buying the products that those toxic Chinese plants are making?
The US automakers won't be forced by the US government to change their designs.
Well, the fuel efficiency standards we have now aren't exactly voluntary. The government doesn't have to mandate a particular design, they can set a higher standard and let the automakers figure out how they want to meet it.
I'll partially agree with Logan. Until I see absolute proof of global warming or climate change or whatever the trendy name for it is now, it will appear to me to just be part of the normal cycles that the earth has gone through for countless millenniums.
Crap, I wasn't done.
HOWEVER, I am not so naiive as to ignore the fact that pollution has affected the environment, and in that sense we as a nation and as a planet need to be conscientious of what we are doing.
I guess I just really have a problem with the idea that all the worlds problems can be "linked" to global warming/climate change instead of the real problems being fixed.
Dallas, I hit comment a bit early without thinking, sorry ^^'
And yeah, I do care. We are already in a war over oil..and the situation will only get worse. Even if we pulled out of Iraq, removing Hussein created a power vacuum that thus-far it seems the Iraqi government has not entirely been able to fill. Maybe in time they will. That+Iran+Pakistan...yeah. Prices have jumped from I believe $1.50 in 2003 to over $3.00 in about four years...I do not look forward to what future prices will be, neither.
Sorry that I rambled a little off topic, but wanted to finish my train of thought...^^'
@Meg: "Oh no, someone has irritated Richard Blumenthal. Now their destruction is assured."
How snarky Meg. Add this to the "enjoy your refund" comment on the makeup post, I'd coulda swore I was at Jezebel.... I like :D
Does the H2 actually weigh more than four and a half tons?
No wonder I feel nervous when one of those long-nailed Carmela Soprano types is tailgating me in an H2. No brakes in the world could stop something that heavy in the distance a half-asleep Honda Civic driver could.
@CaliforniaCajun: Either that or a tailgating F-250/350 on a road notorious for accidents and deaths = one nervous as hell car driver.
Is that Ann Coulter's Hummer?
@CaliforniaCajun:
Wikipedia places the curb weight at over three tons, but that doesn't include passangers or cargo.
@RISwampyankee: No, because if it was Coulter's she'd have immigrant children mushed under the wheels.
LOVE how they always yammer on about the "costs" of doing the right thing, while ignoring the much-higher costs of fixing an obviously stupid policy.
Ordering the White House to examine its policies is meaningless. Ordering them to defend them before the court is another.
richie - that's my boy!
this sets the stage for a ussc showdown on states' rights - i can't wait!
it's simple: if the nhtsa doesn't want to do their job (for whatever reason - most likely b/c it interferes with their tee times), then the states will do it for them.
@humphrmi: you don't know richie, do you? take a look at his track record: he sues everyone (& wins most of the time). maybe the white house isn't shaking in their boots, but you might want to take a look at their pockets - that's generally where he likes to strike.
@Namilia: just to play the devil's advocate here...Heavy Duty pickup trucks have tremendous brakes. I have a mazda 626, a mitsubishi montero, and a dodge 2500 (in its heaviest trim). Which stops the fastest from 60? The dodge. More surface area on the road + 4 or 5 times the braking power on only 3 times the weight means that so long as the person who is "tailgating" you is 3/4 of a second behind (1.5x the average reaction time in that situation), he isn't going to hit you.
Of course if he's fully loaded and weighing about 20 thousand pounds you're pretty well fucked.
@RamV10: I have a two ton Subaru Baja that stops pretty well. Disk brakes all the way around. Had to use it too, quite a few times. That thing can STOP.
Cafe standards don't work as near as well as the marketplace. Three dollar gas will push people to more efficient ways of getting around. Betcha four and five dollar gasoline in a year or two.
Unfortunately, most owners of the super-sized SUVs are soccer moms applying their makeup or overweight suburban middle-aged former junior high football players gone badly to seed, waving a Big Gulp in one hand while screaming at the AM radio about immigrants or The Gays, Ron Paul or what have you. Brakes - and what's ahead - is several items below what they're focused on.
@Rusted: Unfortunately, there's a lot of collateral damage that hits before the marketplace affects demand. Exporting an extra $2 TRILLION dollars/yr to Middle Eastern despots, a $600 MILLION/yr war in Iraq, all the wasted money from the households selling their Hummers at a loss before they get repossessed...
And those are only pure, economic costs. Let alone the soft costs, such as particulates, pollution, road wear & tear, worse traffic, environmental damage, which are HUGELY expensive but difficult to track but are substantial.
That's why they were bad policy to begin with. Their true economic cost should have been factored in, and all the gov't meddling stripped out of truck/SUV pricing. That's the problem with the "free market" approach - in the real world, there are very few markets that are genuinely "free".
Had this been the case, then people that needed trucks/SUVs would buy and use them, which is fine. They're needed, just not by everyone.
Oops, that's two billion/year in extra money going to oil exporters this year.
Oh, and a collapsing dollar. Add that little grenade to the collateral damage list as well.
All the CO2 in the air did not come just from US and Europe. Neither did the CO or SO2. In one major erruption, a valcano can release as much pollutents into the air as US does in 1 year. Mt. St. Helens releases daily roughly 10 tons or more of pollutents into the air and that is just 1 volcano. SO again, anyone who thinks it is just the human race needs their head examined.
@Mr. Gunn:
Nothing has been closed yet and as I stated before, the 9th liberal "we should all be hung" circuit court will be over ruled.
@trai_dep:
mushes illeagals would be more like it and there would be nothing wrong with that in my mind. And here is nothing wrong with the policy as trucks should be allowed to have lower MPG ratings. They are made for a certain type of job. Dont blame the manufactures for low MPG trucks, blame the idiots who buy he damn things and never use them for what they were built for, working.
@Logan26: "All the CO2 in the air did not come just from US and Europe. Neither did the CO or SO2. In one major erruption, a valcano can release as much pollutents into the air as US does in 1 year. Mt. St. Helens releases daily roughly 10 tons or more of pollutents into the air and that is just 1 volcano. SO again, anyone who thinks it is just the human race needs their head examined."
No one here (or any scientist) is saying that humans are the ONLY cause of global warming, just that we're the MAJOR cause. Please read some of the current scientific literature on global warming, you might actually learn something....
Also, How many Mt. St. Helens/Krakotoan/etc.-level volcanic eruptions are there every year? Since 1900, there's only about 1-1.5 every 10 years, usually like clockwork. That's a fairly miniscule amount of particulates/greenhouse gases on a fairly regular basis to account for the rapid upturn in greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution, esp. considering there has not been an upturn in volcanic activity in the past 200 years.
Yeah, the "we'll never be 100% non-polluting so why bother trying" argument is akin to saying, "since we'll never get crime down to 0%, I'm removing my front door". Utter nonsense.
You say noone is blaming the human race and then turn around and dismis volcanic activity as a major contributor and rest the vast amount of the blame on the human race. I'm sorry, I dont buy it and I damn sure as hell dont buy the flawed, its the trendy thing to agree with findings of those who have it in there best interest to follow the liberal line of global warming or lose their funding/be stripped of their title. Id the world getting warmer? Sure, but I'm more inclined to believe its going thru a cycle then to blame things we have done.
@trai_dep:
Wanna help stop polluting big time? Wanna reduce the amount of Oil the US uses on a daily basis. Get congress to allow more Nuclear Power Plants to be built to replace those using Oil based products that use up over 1/2 the oil that is shipped into the US every day.
@Logan26:
"You say noone is blaming the human race..."
No, what I said was no one was saying humans were the ONLY factor. Way to twist my words.
"liberal line of global warming or lose their funding/be stripped of their title..."
I was willing to debate your stance until you made this about partisan politics. You've proven that you're simply one of those hardcore political sycophants with more misplaced zealotry than common sense.
Guess what? The world is a bit more complex than trying to find the "liberal" or "conservative" agenda in everything.
Kinda to argue my points when they are true. Countless people have lost there jobs as meteroligists because they didn't buy into or tow the "Global Warming" line. Numbers of others have lost funding because they also didn't cow tow and follow the "Global Warming" agenda or had the courage to challenge the findings of the "Global Warming" junk science. Everyone, including yourself seems to think it can't be anything other than what it says.
@RamV10: True, but it still unnerves me even though it is highly improbable that they will hit me.
@Logan26: This map by a top meteorologist and climatologist basically backs up your cycle idea..[www.longrangeweather.com]
I believe that the reason that the most recent swing as shown on the graph is that way because we've only monitored global temperatures for a relatively short time. I could be wrong, though.
@Logan26: Sure. I'll do that as soon as you volunteer to house the 3 million tons of spent nuclear waste (that will continue to be toxic beyond human imagining for 3,000,000 times as long as homo sapiens learned to write) in your backyard.
And your kids' backyard. And your grandkids' backyard. And your great-grandkids' backyard. And your great-great-grandkids' backyard. And your great-great-great-grandkids' backyard. And your great-great-great-great-grandkids' backyard. And your great-great-great-great-great-grandkids' backyard. And your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids' backyard. And your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkids' backyard.
Not a perfect solution, since we'll need to find some suckers in Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia. But it's a start!
Thanks, Logan!
@Logan26: (countless lost jobs)
And I'm sure many cartographers lost their jobs when they insisted the world was flat after a general consensus was reached that it was, in fact, round.
The glory of the Scientific Method is, adapt or die. Guess who didn't adapt?
@Logan26:
As soon as a Republican administration stops censoring scientific climate data on tests done by government agencies that don't jive with its "global-warming-is-a-liberal-conspiracy" agenda (as the Bush admin has done since it entered office), only then can you start talking about "liberal" bias.
@trai_dep:
There is nothing wrong with the way things are stored today, and I would have no issue if they got the rights to put the stuff 3000ft below the ground near where I live. By the way, hows it feel to be a NIMBY and the main cause behind over 50% of the electricity made today being that from Petrol based plants. You want us to reduce emmissions but are unwilling to do anything besides make vehicles run on alternate fuels or be hybrids.
Or maybe they have people who dont buy into the junk science that everyone else has been brainwashed into believing. Yourself for example.
Screw the global warming debate!
The question is why are these so-called light trucks are allowed to pollute more than passenger cars? What's so light weight about a 10,300 lb. Hummer?
Why in the fuck should some overblown, gas guzzling, Yuppie pickup truck get a pollution break over my lighter weight, higher milage car?
I personally can afford the gas prices as it is, so I ride my bicycle instead. Though people around where I live have yet to acclimate to having to share the road with their giant trucks that cant take a speedbump and a bicycle. I've been hit riding twice, and still live to tell the tale, astonishingly enough. Once by a white SUV, the other by a power-crazed station wagon.
Cur, yup, exactly. That's the point. The law when made (and we were ignorant) was senseless and now it's folly. Treat 'em as they are: fashion accessories with tires. For insecure people who aren't particularly well-endowed.
Logan - you really don't have a scale of what is involved w/ half-lives. Bury-and-forget-it might work for a human life, but try looking at things at the geologic scale. It should give you pause. Rather, it'd give any thinking person pause.
Sorry if mentioned before, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has the most overturned rulings because, out of all the courts of appeal, it takes in the most cases - Its percentage of rulings overturned are inline with the rest of them.
But, by all means, let's not let facts intrude our nice little anti-responsibility bubble. I mean, China has shitty (or weakly enforced) labor and manufacturing laws so we should follow suit - Why should they have such an unfair advantage?!?!?!
Um, people, how sad is it that you let China's lack of responsibility dictate US policy? Why don't we just go ahead and hand over the government to them since we've decided that we're not going to sacrifice the easy way for the right way until they do.
If they really want to cut down on the pollution cars create the Feds should mandate all states perform emissions testing. You car should not pollute more than it did when built. The poorly tuned, oil burning wrecks that are all over our nations roads spew more pollution in a month than all the new cars sold today produce in a year. Soon we will all be living under Calif. Emissions standards the way it is going anyhow.
I know it will tick off people, but the only way to really cut emissions is adopt the Japanese plan. 3 years or 60 K and you have to junk it.
Imagine a world with no classic cars, that would suck
![[www.longrangeweather.com]](http://www.longrangeweather.com/images/GTEMPS.gif){kind=link}
Like it or not, this will get turned on appeal.
The 9th circuit gets overturned more then any other court does.