Auto industry needs to be saved from itself
Toolbox
Published: May 13, 2007
The court case in which the auto industry is challenging Vermont's auto emission standards has unveiled the kind of Alice in Wonderland thinking that has decimated the industry in the United States.
The auto industry has challenged Vermont's decision to sign onto California's auto emission standards, which would force reductions in carbon dioxide emissions over the next decade. The absurdity of the industry's arguments was on full display in U.S. District Court in Burlington.
If the auto industry were forced to adopt higher emission standards, witnesses said, it might be forced to lay off workers. Dealerships would close. Distributors would suffer.
Like Toyota.
No, wait. Toyota has just passed General Motors for the first time, making it the world's largest auto maker. It is not Toyota that is shrinking and laying off workers. Toyota, which specializes in high-quality, fuel-efficient, durable cars, is doing well.
The U.S. auto industry, meanwhile, continues to implode. At a hearing in federal court two weeks ago, a lawyer for the Sierra Club introduced filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission showing that General Motors plans to close 12 plants and Ford plans to close 14.
The auto industry needs to be saved from itself. And the United States and the world need to save themselves from the environmental damage caused by an industry wedded to the past and heading into the future with blinders on.
Anyone who lived through the oil crisis of the 1970s could have seen this coming. The U.S. auto industry makes its biggest profits from the SUVs and light trucks that guzzle gas and satisfy the appetite of the American consumer for big horsepower.
But when gas prices climb, sales of inefficient auto behemoths fall and the sales of Japanese cars soar.
The new element today is awareness of global warming and of the need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide.
It is for that purpose that Vermont is among 10 states to endorse California's strict emission standards, which would require step-by-step improvements to fuel efficiency. Predictably, the auto industry claims it could not possibly meet those standards without horrific job losses.
What has happened instead? A refusal to innovate and horrific job losses.
James Hansen, the NASA scientist who is director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified in Burlington that the Vermont regulations make "enormous sense." Hansen is the climate scientist whom the Bush administration sought to censor but who has continued to speak out as a voice of reason on global warming.
Auto industry spokesmen sought to show that Vermont's regulations would do little to solve the climate problem. Even the 11 states together, including California, could not solve global warming.
It is a base and conscience-free argument, capable of paralyzing action everywhere around the globe.
No single city, state or nation can slow or halt global warming; nor can the world do so unless every city, state and nation joins in the effort. If each small entity is blocked by the excuse that it alone cannot solve the problem, then nothing will happen.
But letting the states take action begins the wave of actions necessary to deal with the crisis. No single drop can form a wave, but a wave does not exist without many drops massing together.
The nation's climate policy must not be dictated by the foot-dragging industries that seek to preserve their profits, nonexistent as they are, by resisting changes necessary to address the globe's climate challenge.
We hope U.S. District Judge William Sessions sees in the law a way to a result that allows action by the nation's forward-thinking states.
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