Energy plan pushes automakers on mpg

Everybody knows about the soaring oil prices and problem with global warming. To help deal with this, Congress passed a bill to raise mile-per-gallon standards. Auto industries had already been planning to do this (such as they did for the Prius), however this bill will compel them to make more fuel-efficient vehicles on a faster timeline. "The auto industry's fleet of new cars, sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and vans will have to average 35 mpg by 2020, according to the agreement that congressional negotiators announced late Friday...It would be first increase ordered by Congress in three decades." (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071202/ap_on_go_co/more_mpg). Sen. Diane Feinstein said, "It is a major milestone and the first concrete legislation to address global warming." Unfortunately, the article holds that this bill "may face problems over requirements for nonpublic electric utilities to produce 15 percent of their power from renewable energy sources such as wind or solar."

I hope this bill (or perhaps a compromise of it) works. Everybody knows that things really need to get done to solve the oil and gas-emission problems, but not much progress has been made. This bill shows that people are starting to get serious about getting things done, instead of mostly talking about getting things done. Maybe we'll see some nice debates about this coming up in the primary debates, huh?

I'd also like to note something extra about this article. "Rick Wagoner, General Motors Corp.'s chairman and chief executive, said the new rules [in the bill] would 'pose a significant technical and economic challenge to the industry.' He said GM would tackle the changes 'with an array of engineering, research and development resources.'"
The article makes GM sound really supporting and into all this, however I encourage people to check out a 2006 documentary film titled "Who Killed the Electric Car?" General Moters had a line of battery electric vehicles (which they called EV-1's) in the 1990's. The film accounts that GM wrongly felt that there was no demand for their product and so took back every EV-1 and disposed of them. The films also explores a couple of other reasons for the destruction of EV-1's, such as: both the oil and auto industries were unhappy with this line because they were afraid of losing money. Again, I encourage people to watch the documentary or even just look it up online. For a small link to get you going, someone else posted a small blog entry about it here: http://tonyguitar.blogspot.com/2006/07/why-did-gm-kill-ev-1.html. Check it out.