This week saw the House, in a typical display of cowardice, greed, and ideology, pass an energy bill that would mandate drilling in the Arctic refuge, license more coalburning and nuclear power plants, and (oh acme of corporate happiness! Oh Tom Delay�s toupee! Oh American satanic mills, asleep in every garage! � to get all Allen Ginsburg about it) block raising the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standard, and in particular the notoriously lower CAFE for what are comically called light trucks, officially defined as those having a �gross vehicle weight rating� of 6000 pounds or less. This action comes on the heels of our latest amnesia � that is, the announcement in the spring, when fuel prices were high, by the Big Three that they were voluntarily going to raise the miles per gallon for both passenger and light truck. Yeah, right. Because amnesia leads to repetition � memory loss being one thing, and habit, or addiction, being quite another, this the double track of human nature � nobody remembers that the same noise came rolling out of Detroit, like a sadly safety challenged Pinto, in the seventies, and thereafter has been issued whenever legislation looked like it was going to force Detroit to actually move its more than 6000 pound metal behind.

The history of Detroit�s callous attitude towards clean cars has been detailed by Jack Doyle in a book entitled Taken for a Ride, put out by Four Walls Four Windows press (which, incidentally, puts out some killer investigative journalism). Doyle was interviewed about the book by EVWorld. Doyle discusses an argument made by the UAW to nudge enough Dems loose to support continuing the CAFE freeze � that the standards would lead to job cuts. The thinking is, it is so expensive to institute the technology that would be necessary to achieve fuel efficiency that the companies would have to shut down factory lines. As Doyle points out, quite correctly, the auto companies seem to have no problem throwing the truly astonishing wads of money they have amassed in the past ten to fifteen years � veddy veddy good years for Detroit�s profit picture, and enough to make the whole of the computer industry look like yokels vending home made pie recipes � to buy diverse non-auto-related companies (did anybody say Hughes Electronics) and revamp, at exorbitant cost, factories with up to date robotics and computers. The odious Roger Smith, former CEO of GM, was particularly gaga about robotics, and spent enormous sums on them without getting a corresponding return. One study concluded about Smith�s leadership of GM in the eighties:
�GM ended up spending tens of billions of dollars for little or no reward. Despite the high-tech, GM became less, not more, efficient.� So one can only conclude that money spent making cars and light trucks more fuel efficient is magic money, peculiarly cursed from the labor perspective.