[sailaway21]

MoronicinMass fails to appreciate that simply raising the miles per gallon that cars get results in increased miles being driven. The same thing happens when energy-saving light bulbs are mandated while energy costs remain static. Yeah, they've already studied that one, years ago in Iowa, I believe.

Half the town got energy efficient bulbs and the other half used the old incandescent. Energy use for the town actually went up! It makes sense if you have the least understanding of economics, which I know is a stretch for our Mass. resident.

If you have a car that get's 20 mpg and it's a thousand miles to grandma's house, it's going to cost you around two hundred bucks to drive there and back with gas at $2/gallon, for just fuel alone. If you're on a tight budget, that's a trip you don't make.

If your car get's 40 mpg, the trip cost is halved to $100 and may well happen.

Remember, the debate is not about the desirability of fuel efficient cars, it's about energy usage and pollution.

So, If you want to reduce energy consumption, with a static energy cost per unit, in this case gasoline, the best thing you can do is ensure that cars remain gas guzzlers. In the above illustration, the poor mileage car used no gas and had no emissions because the trip did not take place.

In the more efficient car the trip took place and US energy consumption and pollution increased as a result. Economists describe this in therms of marginal utility. For those in Massachusetts, here's the Wiki def of the term:
In economics, the marginal utility of a good or of a service is the utility of the specific use to which an agent would put a given increase in that good or service, or of the specific use that would be abandoned in response to a given decrease. In other words, marginal utility is the utility of the marginal use — which, on the assumption of economic rationality, would be the least urgent use of the good or service, from the best feasible combination of actions in which its use is included.[1][2] Under the mainstream assumptions, the marginal utility of a good or service is the posited quantified change in utility obtained by increasing or by decreasing use of that good or service.

And that is why CAFE and other government mandated efficiencies do not work absent market incentives. There is a virulent strain of moronics about, at epidemic proportions in some eastern states, that think legislating efficiency can solve our problems. Of course these hypocritical asses, see Al Gore's house, always think that other people's behavior, not their own, needs to be changed.

And CAFE gets you a mix of products from the manufacturer that, under it's new guidelines, will make a large seven passenger van either unavailable or so expensive you cannot afford one, regardless of your pressing need to transport seven passengers to the Save the Unborn Gay Whales convention!

While I am anti-tax in principle and practice, if you want more fuel efficient cars and trucks, raise the tax on gas and diesel. Of course, that means you'll be raising airline ticket prices, postal prices, UPS and FedEx prices, food prices, and the cost for any service you use that depends upon fossil fuels but....it will get you higher mileage cars and it will reduce fuel consumption.

So. while I'm more than willing to criticize the stupidity being spouted from Massachusetts based on it's delineated goals alone, I have chosen not to do so. Instead, I'll content myself with this explanation of why the anti-capitalist method of achieving those goals ensures that the goals will never be met.

Now there are some of us whom think that people like MindlessinMass are not all that dumb. I'm not one of them, but they're out there. And when confronted with the simple economics lesson above, and the certain knowledge that even an IQ of room temperature can understand it, they reach the conclusion that any policy that in known to be doomed to failure by it's own authors must have an ulterior motive. What motive might that be?

Well. It's all about control, the state with it's designated bureaucratic experts, controlling your life and how you live it. It's how they do it in France and most of the rest of Europe. The state "expert" comes in and describes the "problem" in scientific terms, and that's the end of any debate. See, if you control the definition of the problem, you control the definition of all actions to follow, the solution becoming irrelevant. And that results in an "us and them" society. Al Gore jets about while you drive a two cylinder Yugo with a roof rack.

So while those people think that there is an ulterior motive behind all of this that results in an enlargement of the state, and state power, with a concomitant increase in the need for bureaucratic experts and that everyone on that side of the issue knows it, I have my doubts. I think a lot of supporters of such ideas are just dupes, fellow travelers for the Marxist cause, and just plain stupid. I have ample evidence for this, merely a post or two away.