The EPA has decided to revisit, revise, and lower fuel efficiency standards for cars sold in the US for the model years 2022-2025.  The Obama administration EPA had mandated that overall fleet fuel efficiency—averaged across all models of cars built by a manufacturer—be raised to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 from 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016.  This would have represented a greater than 50% increase in fuel efficiency in just 10 short years.

Environmentalists are up in arms over the move.  Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund President:

Designing and building cleaner, more cost-efficient cars is what helped automakers bounce back from the depths of the recession and will be key to America’s global competitiveness in the years ahead.

And Jon Foley, California Academy of Sciences Executive Director, tweeted

This move wastes energy, and makes more dependent on foreign oil.

Both misunderstand.  Krupp is right that building better cars helped automakers recover from the Panic of 2008, but he missed two Critical Items.  One is that American automakers, pre-Panic, were churning out junk and losing market share to better manufacturers.  When they stopped building junk, they got competitive again.

That brings me to the second Critical Item.  It was free market competitive forces—and the Panic to drive that home—that enabled the American automakers, building better cars, to get back into the game.  It was free market competition, in response to changing consumer demands, that pushed automakers to build more reliable, more fuel efficient cars (and trucks), with competition moving to hold prices down.

Neither of those had, or have, anything to do with government mandates.

Foley just seems to have not been paying attention over the last few years.  New technologies for locating oil and gas and for extracting those have lowered the cost of oil and gas for a whole host of uses, including car and truck fuel, and those technologies have led the US to be a larger producer of oil and gas than any other nation, save Russia—and we expect to surpass Russia in a couple of years.  There’s not much dependence on foreign oil here.

Oh, and one last thing.  The cost of buying a car won’t be so great now that manufacturers don’t have to waste capital on crash courses in engine development and can instead move at the pace of market competition.

Now, if only we could get rid of the ethanol mandate, too, so car maintenance and food costs could be reduced.

The Obama Labor Department, under the suzerainty of Tom Perez who is now the Progressive-Democratic National Committee Chairman, enacted a rule that allowed individuals to hale into court principals of employer or union retirement plans for the crime of charging commissions for their actions.  The rule also redefined “investment advice fiduciaries” to include broker-dealers and financial-insurance agents whose activities are limited to selling financial products.

The 5^th Circuit struck the rule as illegal.  That’s good news for all of us.

However.

The Trump Labor Department has said it won’t enforce the rule and is working with the SEC on a new one….

The first part of that is good (and to be expected, since it’s unsavory to enforce an illegal rule).  However, with respect to the second part, it would be better if the Labor Department just sat down and shut up on this. This matter has nothing to do with Labor or with labor.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece titled Biofuel Mandates Are a Bad Idea Whose Time May Be Up that centered on the possibility that these might get watered down, or even eliminated, sometime “soon.”

The Renewable Fuel Standard, which forces oil refiners to mix corn-based fuel into gasoline, is one of history’s great policy boondoggles.

Well, NSS.  The only things it’s done of practical consequence have been to serve as a backdoor subsidy for farmers and to drive up the cost of corn, corn substitutes, and food that eats corn.  And to drive up the cost of gasoline and to create ethanol fuel-related automobile engine maintenance costs.

But that’s the problem with Government mandates in general when they’re intended to create a market for a particular product.

As a mandate, the time for this one on biofuels never was.