Recent legal news has begin to cover a troubling change beginning to play at the edges of American law.  In New Jersey, the state’s court of appeals set aside a shocking ruling from one of the state’s trial courts which would have held that a man who abused and sexually violated his wife because “he was operating under [Islamic religious] his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to.”  The court of appeals, in no uncertain terms, properly held the trial court’s opinion to be inconsistent with both New Jersey and federal law.  This case, however appropriately it appears to have turned out, appears, to me, to raise a significant problem for the left.

It goes virtually without saying that the interest in merging Sharia law with US law is an exercise being undertaken exclusively by leftists.  Britain, of course, has actual Sharia courts, established as arbitration tribunals, which hear cases and issue rulings which have the force of law.  In other European nations, national courts have occasionally ruled consistent with Sharia principles despite national laws which point in the opposite direction.  France, though they haven’t got Sharia courts, do have a Sharia tax code which aims to deal with some of the peculiarities of Islamic financial management.  The US, so far, has only rogue judges in liberal states.

So far, Sharia courts and Sharia-related court decisions have all been based on one of three general legal categories: probate, equity, and domestic violence.  It is the cases of domestic violence which are most troubling, and the case in New Jersey illustrates precisely why.

In the New Jersey case, as mentioned, a man raped his wife on multiple occasions under the belief that it was his right, as her husband, to do so.  Had he done that even 35 years ago, it would not have been a crime in the US.  However, as of 1993, spousal rape became a crime in every corner of the United States at the urging of the feminist movement.  In addition to US law, spousal rape is identified in the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, Article 2(a) as a form of violence against women.  There is, I think it is safe to say, a solid consensus which sweeps broadly against ideological lines that cannot tolerate the behavior that took place in New Jersey.  As the self-declared champions of women’s rights, women’s equality, and the fight to end violence against women, it would seem that the left has a vested interest in making sure that no woman is ever raped by her husband ever again.

The stakes, however, go even beyond the question of spousal rape in Islamic marriages.  From what I have been able to find of the trial judge’s logic, it appears to be relatively unbounded.  If the touchstone of the judge’s ruling is the “belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to,” what about that is so closely bounded to Islam that it could not be applied elsewhere?  After all, that was everyone’s belief — and the law — until 1975, meaning most of America grew up in a country where there was no such thing as spousal rape.  And even further, what if I find that it is my belief as a man my “desire to have sex when and whether [I want] to” with anyone that I please?  There would be no such thing as rape, if only I didn’t believe in it.

Rulings like one in New Jersey place the left on a collision course with itself.  It is simply not possible to champion women’s rights and a culture which systematically represses and does violence to women at the same time.  But perhaps the thought that they might even try is part of the reason that the left, right now, has a woman problem.  I, for one, would rather see them win some women back than bury the rest of us under Islamic law.

Tags: court opinions, logic, racial politics, sharia law

With Obama having now signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill into law, it’s worth pausing for a moment or two to wonder what, exactly, might have been the point.  For most of us out here in the country at large, the main thing that we want from this bill (ignoring, for a moment, that most of us don’t want this bill) is to know that the economy is never again going to go into a tailspin the way it did in 2008.  Even though nobody knows how the law works, we can at least be sure that it will prevent another economic breakdown.  Indeed, thousands of pages should be more than enough to ensure that another economic crisis won’t ever come up again.  The best news is, we’ll find out if it worked as soon as another crisis happens.

Fortunately, it seems that the next crisis may not be too long in coming.  Though nobody can predict a crisis with certainty, it does appear that the country is on a dangerous ledge.  Even Dodd says so.  But with the bill in place, we can at least be secure in the knowledge that we will be able to find out, through the course of the crisis, how well law prevents the next crisis from occurring.

If that seemed like it was worded awkwardly, it’s because the concept itself is awkward.  According to Dodd, we can only know how well the bill works when the next crisis hits.  But the supposed point of the bill is to prevent another economic crisis from ever occurring.  The tautology is fascinating, because between Dodd and Obama, we know for a fact that the only thing this bill can do is fail.

Of course, the open secret about te bill is the fact that it has nothing to do with actually preventing another crisis. In truth, Obama and Dodd are probably looking forward to another crisis, in hope of using their new toolkit to extend their stranglehold over American business.

But for ordinary Americans, the key measure of success won’t be whether the government can successfully wind down a bank that’s “too big to fail.” Success to us means having jobs, having an accurate value for our homes and financial investments, having money left after taxes to put in the bank, and having a bank left to put our money into. Nothing in the bill addresses any of those concerns.

Once again, the government has (willfully) missed the point.

Drifting across the Internet this evening, I happened across a rather peculiar story in the LA Times opinion section.  The story is as entertaining as a Sunday drive gone bizarrely wrong; which, when you get right down to it, is pretty close to what the story is all about.

The story, you see, is about the author who was out driving one day when some guy in a mini-van pulled up along side him and told him that he should be listening to talk radio, rather than the old music he was playing instead.  To most of us, of course, this would come as more than a bit of a surprise.  We don’t normally plan to be interrupted from our cocoons of roadway silence except in case of some sort of emergency, and it would be hard to fault the author for finding the whole encounter rather rude.  And so, like any of us in his place might do, the author decides that the best response is to roll up his window and waste an untold amount of his day following and stalking the van.

The author, it seems, had just entered into to the Left’s curious love affair with hate.

To even think about chasing the van out of town should be far enough over the edge for any man to consider, but as he followed the man in the van, his mind seemed to wind down more bizarre back alleys than his car is ever likely to find.  He “tailed the driver of the Caravan as indiscreetly as possible, hoping he’d see me, realize who I was, get nervous, then scared, then terrified, then have a massive coronary and slam into a 300-year-old sycamore.”  A prayer that another man receive the death penalty, simply for suggesting a different station on the radio.  And a murderous prayer that he would be that conservative’s angel of death.

Luckily, in the end, he backs off from his murderous rage, and sets about writing this interesting anecdote for the paper.  No harm, no foul, I suppose.

But what, I wonder, might be the “symptoms of a sick society” which could cause a man who is ideally so tolerant of the opinions of others to chase out of town those opinions which differ from his own.  It certainly isn’t Internet-promoted “democratization [that] leads people to believe that their opinions not only count but must be broadcast at every opportunity.”  Or, who knows, perhaps it is.  A man with a bumper sticker and who actually gets paid when his ideas are broadcast is certainly going to be farther ahead than a man with an old van with power windows.  But no.  The freedom of speech and an open dialogue of political discourse are the light and cleanser which wipe away rage.  The answer, surely, must be something else.

Perhaps, in the end, the author gives us just the hint that we need to find out what the true source of “uranium-enriched behavior” in political society is.  It may simply be the impulse response to chase away disfavored ideas while casting those who express those ideas in a hostile light.  Perhaps it is not “democratization” that is the problem, but the attempt to shut down, thwart, bypass, suppress, chase away, and ram democracy into a 300-year-old sycamore that is really at fault.

Perhaps what we really need to do is put everyone on the Left through classes in anger management.

A recent article by Victor Davis Hanson over at National Review Online draws, in the course of making a broader argument, an interesting analogy which got me thinking about America’s current place in history.  He notes, quite interestingly, that the current noise over boycotts against Arizona have “a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another.”  This statement caught my attention as being both insightful and intriguing.  At the risk of jumping into “revolutionary” talk that even I think is somewhat overdone, I do have to wonder if America might be coming to the precipice of what I would consider to be the third American revolution.

Looking back historically, the first two revolutions both have remarkably common elements about them.  Both of the first two revolutions, the American Revolution and the Civil War, were, at an important level, battles over the role of government in America.  This battle is easily seen in the American Revolution, as nearly every history class around will characterize it as a fight against the tyranny of England and the unjust, confiscatory tax policies of King George.  Those who supported American independence were convinced that the Crown was too powerful, and the battle against England was an ultimately successful fight to cast off the reigns of an overpowering central government and return a degree of independence not only to the colonies as nations, but to the colonists as individuals.  Harder to see but no less present are the shades of government oppression in play during the Civil War.  Although the common story is that the Civil War was about slavery, the issue of slaves was more of a proxy for a deeper battle being waged against the reach of the federal government, particularly in southern states which viewed the northern and federal campaign against slavery as an assault on their independence.  The South, of course, lost that battle, and the entire concept of state independence has never quite been the same since.

Of course, at the time of the Civil War, the slow collapse of federalism and the rise of federal power were hardly the foregone conclusions that they appear to have become today.  Nevertheless, the government’s intervention to bring about the demise of slavery set a precedent for using government intervention to cure America’s ills.  FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and everything that the Warren Court did, all take their strength from the fact that the government was able to “solve” slavery by aggrandizing power to itself.

What President Obama has now given us is the clearest glimpse to date of the consequences of reassigning power from the people to the government following the Civil War.  No longer is the government in the business of solving real problems like slavery or segregation — to their credit, my parents’ generation has taken care of the lingering inequalities which had echoed through time all the way since the founding.  What we see instead is that the government spends its time building up power by attacking an endless army of straw men, crafting “solutions” for things which are not problems, imagining problems and then purporting to solve them, and providing solutions to problems which would not have existed if not for the government.

The Tea Party movement — a name which, itself, conjures memories of the first revolution — is the first, best indication that the people have had enough.  As I have said now many times, the culture wars of the current generation will give way to a deeper battle over the role of government itself in America.  Tea Partiers all come from diverse walks of conservatism, and many would certainly disagree on many aspects of the culture wars including such staple issues as abortion, gay marriage, and religion.  They have, however, united under a common banner against the size and scope of the government as it exists today and as its current administration wants to grow it long into the future.  The younger generation has reached the point where the fight over liberty itself has become more important than the petty squabbles over what to do with the freedoms that have been secured.

American revolutions have never been about land, or money, or politics, or power.  They have, fundamentally, been about changing the relationship between the people and their government.  It seems to me that America is closing in on rekindling that old fight.  Shades of 1850 might just be about right.

Tags: freedom

Back in May on the blog Public Discourse, James Stoner points out an interesting analogy between Apple and the government.  In a post primarily dealing with the porn scandal at the SEC, Mr. Stoner added the following interesting comments about Apple and the iPhone:

Coincidentally, during the week that saw the announcement of the report on pornography use at the SEC there also surfaced a comment from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, defending his company’s ban of pornography “apps” for iPhone and other Apple products. Apologizing to a user for mistakenly rejecting an app with a controversial political cartoon, Jobs added, “However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone,” (Android is the comparable product of his new competitor, Google). The Wired article relaying the comment interprets “Jobs’ opposition to porn [as] loud and clear,” but adds no reasons from Jobs for his opposition: Is his a moral objection to pornography, a purely aesthetic distaste, concern about his company’s branding, concern about its market with the parents of young teens getting their first phone, or some combination of all these? The response of many geeks was instantaneous and predictable: Don’t tell me what I can and cannot watch, that’s why I’ll never buy Apple, “The web is about openness. It’s about freedom.” For whatever reason, Jobs seems unyielding and his company vigilant. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition passes muster, even Playboy without nudity and a reader for the iPhone that allows downloading of the ancient Kama Sutra are allowed, but try to sneak pornographic images into an approved app and iTunes will cut you off.

He then adds:

[O]ne can commend Steve Jobs for steadfastly refusing to allow Apple to become a platform for easy access to pornography, and commend him as well for showing that this can be done through determined business leadership, without recourse to government regulation that can threaten legitimate freedom and impose its own social costs.

But can Steve Jobs really be commended for this? I suppose as one of the “geeks” offering the “predictable” response, Mr. Stoner would be unlikely to have much interest in or patience for my views on the subject of Apple and porn.  I think, however, that it is Mr. Stoner who has missed an important reason why there is little to commend about Apple’s decision to ban pornography from its most newsworthy device.  Although Steve Jobs may be able to limit access to porn, such limits are unlikely to change the hearts and minds of people who would otherwise seek to consume it.

The main flaw in Mr. Stoner’s argument is the unfortunate fact that he reads too much into the distinction between government, on the one hand, and Apple, on the other.  It is, of course, undoubtedly true that Apple is not the government.  Unlike the government, Apple cannot force you to buy its products, and it is far easier for me to buy an EVO-4G instead of an iPhone than it is for me to move from Michigan to Peru.  That said, Apple is, without a doubt, the top central planner of the iPhone environment, and within its electronic walls, Apple acts very much like a fascist government.  While Apple may not necessarily choose winners, they undoubtedly choose the losers of its domain, leaving behind the scattered remains of such notable products as Google Voice and Adobe’s Flash Player, along with many other less notable apps which they rejected from the App Store — and, thus, the iPhone — for numerous reasons, including no reason at all.  Also, like a government, Apple collects sales tax on every piece of software sold for the iPhone, and now seeks to do the same for every advertisement by pushing its iAd service.

In short, while it may be easy to avoid the iPhone environment, once inside, there is very little that can be classified as being “legitimate[ly] free[.]”

With freedom, thus, outside the question, I find it difficult to agree with Mr. Stoner that anything about Apple shutting down porn does anything good for society.  If Steve Jobs were blocking porn as a way to send a message about values, then certainly that would be something to be applauded — except that I don’t think anyone believes that to be the case.  Instead, Apple is engaging in a sort of morally void behavior which just happens to have a desired result.  It is doubtful that anyone who wants to consume porn will find themselves not wanting to consume it because Apple has forbidden the stuff from its iPhone.  People will simply need to go find it somewhere else.

When governments pass laws or companies enact policies that mandate some moralistic result, neither are usually very effective at actually transforming the morals of their citizens or customers.  There is, quite simply, no comparison between choosing to do the right thing versus being prevented from doing things wrong.  Imposing a law against pornography does not take away the desires which bring people to consume it any more than imposing a law of gravity takes away man’s desire to fly.

Rather than trying to outlaw porn, we as a society would be much farther ahead understanding the reasons which bring people to consume it and finding a more wholesome way to satisfy those needs.  If porn is being used as stress relief, we would surely be better off emphasizing other ways to reduce workplace stress either through job restructuring (to combat the cause of stress) or some other physical activity (to direct stressful energies in a more positive direction).  But most important is that people must be made to affirmatively want to do these things, not merely fall into them for lack of a viable alternative.

That said, unlike the government which I consistently believe should be reduced in both size and power, I hold no malice toward Steve Jobs or Apple.  The iPhone, iTunes, the App Store, and all such things are their business and Apple participates in the free market just the same as anybody else.  If Apple wants to banish porn, to choose winners and losers, to lay and collect taxes, or to do any of the other things that they do, then that is entirely their right.

But as I hit “Publish” using my myTouch 3G (with Google), I affirm my own right to make my own choices, and to have my own values to win or lose by the power of persuasion in the marketplace of ideas.

Tags: free markets, freedom, technology

In reading through my collection of news items, I found myself directed to an article in the Daily Mail referencing a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal which reviewed the status of assisted suicide in Belgium.  The study raises some important questions about the policies necessary to allow for an effective assisted suicide program and may fundamentally challenge the idea that such a program can be administered at all.  With “death panels” still fresh in the minds of many Americans, this study is a sober reminder of what’s at stake when we begin to confront the wide expanse of issues related to end of life planning.

To clarify one point right up front: I do favor assisted suicide and would probably vote to legalize the practice if given the chance.  I say probably because I also believe that any acceptable assisted suicide program will require meaningful (state) government involvement to be implemented appropriately, including creating civil and criminal liability for medical professionals who stray too far in blurring the line between euthanasia and murder.

According to the study, of 208 physician-assisted deaths within their study group, 142 occurred with the explicit consent of the patient, while 66 were performed without patient consent.  The study noted that most of the deaths conducted without patient consent occurred in patients over 80 years old who were hospitalized, and the vast majority were patients who were either comatose or who had dementia.  In over 75% of all cases, the decision to end life was discussed with the patient’s family, and in only a few cases was the decision to end the patient’s life discussed with nobody.

The greatest concern has naturally gravitated toward the patients whose lives were ended without having given their express consent.   Such concerns all share in the same core belief that there is something wrong about other people deciding for us when it is time for us to die.  Without a strong principle of restraint, it is easy to see how lives my be ended for medical or political expediency, to help doctors meet bureaucratically imposed death quotas, or to pinch out a population with disfavored political views.

As assisted suicide continues to gain traction in the United States as an acceptable end of life practice, it is important for all of us to think about the practice in terms of our own end of life planning.  Just as we have grown accustomed to “advanced directives” which instruct hospitals and doctors on when to terminate life-saving care, Americans should begin to think about adding some “really advanced directives” concerning if and when it may be appropriate to medically terminate our lives.  For those without a legal directive on record, we should be able to fall back on the experience and policies which, so far, have been mostly successful at balancing the interests of individuals against their prognosis for life.

With a significant number of assisted suicides being performed in the absence of the patient’s consent, the Belgium study points out the need to be clear about our desires at the end of our lives, preferably long before we get there.  With appropriate protections and respect for patient wishes, there is no reason to think that assisted suicide will become a tool of murder against the unwilling.

In the editorial section of the New York Times, the editorial author takes a look at curriculum revisions currently working their way through the school board in Texas.  In describing the curriculum as “politicized,” and in light of the general tenor of the article, it is apparent that the author does not think highly of the changes going on in Texas.  The gut reaction the author intends to solicit, I’m sure, is revulsion at the idea that education in Texas is devolving into yet another political wasteland.  The charge is interesting, and worthy of attention.

Taking for granted that the curriculum in Texas has indeed become politicized, and that this is a bad thing, the obvious question to ask is, “What can be done about it?”  Answering that question depends on properly understanding how education became politicized in the first place.  The author identifies “social conservatives” as the group responsible for the political education that children in Texas may soon receive.  In reaching his answer, the author misses the deeper issue.

To understand how politics gets into the Texas curriculum, the most important factor is the composition of the school board itself.  At present, the Texas school board consists of five Democrats and ten Republicans, with elections every four years.  This makes the composition of the Texas school board identical to almost every public school board in the country: It is 100% composed of politicians.

Whenever politicians become important in any decision making process, it’s a sure bet that the results will be political. To state that any public school curriculum is politicized is to state the obvious.  Of course, what the author undoubtedly means but is not quite prepared to say outright is not that he minds the Texas school board being politicized, but that he minds it reaching a political result with which he disagrees.  Were the school board to have voted to emphasize Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, the benefits of FDR’s New Deal including Social Security, and the great importance of the United Nations to international peace efforts and human rights, I doubt the editorialist would complain very much about politicization at all.

If I am mistaken and the author is truly concerned about politicization of education whether he agrees with the politics being taught or not, then the only real answer is to get rid of the politicians.  This is an area where private education, possibly supported by school vouchers, would be extremely effective.  I know that I would sooner trust a professional educator over a politician to decide what’s best to teach my children.

If, however, the editorialist’s problem is with the outcome, then the real lesson here is a lesson in democracy.  As the political process creates and builds powers, we all run the risk that those powers might be used in ways we do not approve.

Tags: education

Ever since his interview with Rachel Maddow, Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have been the centerpiece of an unfortunately predictable one-sided conversation that the media appears to be having with itself about how thoroughly racist Paul’s comments are.  Even more unfortunate (though just as predictable) has been the media’s effort to discredit the tea party as racist by emphasizing that Rand Paul is, in some sense, their champion from Kentucky.  Whatever the merits of his position, the entire episode has left us with two important points which even conservative commentators have been tending to ignore.  The first is that nobody who understands Libertarianism will be able to find a racist motive in what Rand Paul said.  The second is that what Rand Paul said had nothing to do with the Tea Party.

Even if nothing else comes of his comments, what Paul has given us is an interesting starting point for a serious discussion about what it means to be a Libertarian.  To begin with, Libertarianism as a political concept is one that we know from Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign is a philosophy which Liberals can’t stand, and Conservatives tend to have difficulty swallowing.  In a nutshell, Libertarians believe that the government should do no more than it absolutely must.  In support of their philosophy, Libertarians tend to be skeptical of any government institution, even those with long and highly praised histories.  Libertarians also tend to be a bit irreverent when it comes to government institutions.  The skepticism certainly grates on the Left, and the irreverence tends to make the Right nervous.

Both traits, however, were certainly on display during the interview with Rachel Maddow.  In this case, the institution is the Civil Rights Act itself — in particular, the bits that make private sector discrimination illegal.  Even the most simple-minded understanding of the interview reveals that Paul has absolutely no love of discrimination in any form.  I find it inconceivable that he would allow discrimination to go on in any business that he owned, and I think it would be interesting to ask if he would frequent businesses which he knew to have discriminatory practices.  Yet, in his skepticism he clearly sees something improper about outlawing private sector discrimination, and in his irreverence he’s actually willing to say so.

However understandable his statement may be within the realm of Libertarian thought, what has been clear for a very long time is the fact that Libertarian thought does not dominate Conservatism, even the “radical” sort expressed by the Tea Parties.  Indeed, from what I’ve observed, the Tea Parties have been willing to mostly gloss over the deep divide between Republicanism¹ and Libertarianism by uniting on the common ground issue of fiscal responsibility in government.  Whether willful or not, the Tea Parties have done an excellent job of staying away from social issues and focusing intensely on the government’s role in the economy.  Were the Tea Parties a social-issues movement rather than an economic-issues movement, I doubt Rand Paul would have enjoyed much success.

In sum, most of the mainstream commentary about the Maddow interview has gotten the core issue predictably wrong.  However, I hope that Conservatives, at least, will look past the immediate spin from the mainstream commentators and use Rand Paul’s comments to think a bit more deeply about the role of government in society.  After all, we will only be able to put off for so long the evil day on which the Republican/Libertarian divide comes to a head.  The Civil Rights Act provides an outstanding starting point for having an adult conversation about the duties and obligations of our government.

1. For lack of a better term.  Think about the kinds of things Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, and other prominent Conservative commentators might say to get a feel for what I mean. [↩]

Tags: Libertarian, racial politics, Rand Paul

In what one could only wish was an April Fool’s joke, the EPA and NHTSA have released their new standard for Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) on American automobiles.  Based on the new standards, it appears that CAFE now joins the growing list of government names which don’t actually mean what they say.  Forget fuel economy, CAFE is now all about Carbon Dioxide.

To understand exactly what’s going on, it’s worth a brief history lesson in the history of vehicle output regulations.  In the US, vehicle regulations have essentially taken on two basic forms, one dealing with emissions, and the other dealing with efficiency.  Emissions based regulations focus, as the name suggests, on the chemicals being emitted from the vehicle’s tailpipe, and are designed to eliminate atmospheric pollutants which are directly harmful to human health, believed to cause global warming, or both.  Efficiency regulations, by contrast, are designed to reduce the amount of fuel used by vehicles in light of the fact that petroleum is a scarce resource.

The history of CAFE can be tied pretty much directly to the Arab Oil Embargo of the early 1970s.  At the time, fuel was not a particularly scarce resource, and the average motorist had little reason to be overly concerned about the amount of money being spent at the pump.  Auto makers, accordingly, focused on features that consumers were interested in; things like power and luxury.  This, of course, became a problem when the fuel supply shrank rapidly, causing people to become suddenly conscious of how far they could drive on a tank of gas.  In modern politics, fuel efficiency has been linked primarily to concerns over energy independence and the price of gasoline.

The new CAFE standard abandons that history entirely.  By refocusing CAFE on CO₂, the EPA has transformed an efficiency regulation into an emissions regulation.  Rather than regulating fuel efficiency directly, the EPA is now regulating the number of grams of CO₂ emitted per mile.  To maintain the illusion that CAFE remains about fuel efficiency as opposed to CO₂ efficiency, the EPA has put together a chart showing both grams of CO₂ per mile and the “equivalent” traditional miles per gallon.

The equivalence between Carbon Dioxide and fuel mileage, however, is based on a set of assumptions about how vehicle manufacturers design their cars and trucks.  In essence, it assumes that a standard vehicle emits a certain number of grams of CO₂ per gallon of gasoline.  Unfortunately for consumers who care about fuel economy, there is nothing magical about that number.  Manufacturers could, for instance, install a heavy CO₂ scrubber which adds weight to the vehicle, thus reducing its miles per gallon, even as it drives CO₂ emissions toward zero.  That approach is, in essence, exactly the approach taken to reducing other pollutants to comply with emissions regulations.

At present, consumers have become reasonably conscious of fuel efficiency and consider the number of miles their vehicle will travel per gallon of gas as a factor in buying a new car or truck.  As such, it’s an open question whether this revision to CAFE will have any effect on fuel efficiency overall.  It is important to be aware, however, that the government will no longer be in the business of driving up fuel efficiency.  They have now set their entire focus on carbon.

Tags: climate change, energy