Kicking the oil habit
IF PRESIDENT BUSH is serious about getting Americans off what he called their ''addiction" to oil, he will insist on tougher mileage standards for sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks than his administration has proposed. It is bad enough that such vehicles are not held to the higher mileage requirements of regular cars. But the country would go a long way toward reduced oil use if the administration would insist on more than just a 1.8 mile per gallon increase in efficiency for these vehicles by 2011.
It is also difficult to take seriously the president's words about Americans' oil addiction when senators from his party use every possible parliamentary gimmick to win approval for the right to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Just months after being rebuffed on this issue, drilling supporters want to include a green light for the drilling in a budget resolution, which cannot be filibustered. They are seeking this approval just as Alaska's North Slope tries to clean up from the biggest oil spill in its history.
The country would need less oil from Alaska or the Middle East with more efficient engines in the light truck category of SUVs, pickups, and minivans, which consume 20 percent of all oil used in the United States. But under the draft rule proposed last August, companies would have to raise their average mileage for such models from 22.2 miles per gallon to just 24.
The advocacy group Environmental Defense would increase the target to 26 miles per gallon. It says that such a standard, combined with a requirement that heavier pickups and Hummers be held for the first time to any efficiency level, would yield 25 percent of the reduction in oil consumption that Bush laid down as a goal in February.
Achieving such mileage gains would require no technological breakthroughs. Each year, automotive engineers come up with engine efficiency improvements, but these have been negated by greater horsepower, bigger size, and more luxury features. According to Environmental Defense, a modification like deactivating cylinders when all eight are not needed is used now in some truck models and could be used in more. The companies could also go a long way toward meeting a 26-mile-per-gallon requirement simply by focusing their marketing on the more efficient models they already produce.
A decision by Bush to reject the weak rule of last August and embrace a tougher one would put muscle on an oil-reduction policy that is all rhetoric now. If the president at the same time told Republicans in Congress to stop angling for drilling rights in the Arctic refuge, he would also make the point that Americans would see an environmental benefit from ending their oil addiction.
