Some Other Inconvenient Truths

LAUSANNE, Switzerland Dear members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee:

You and the media are primed for the big show opening on Capitol Hill next week -- a parade of top automotive industry executives coming before your committee to testify about what they are and aren't doing, what they can and can't do, and to hear what you want them to do to improve automotive fuel economy and help reduce tailpipe emissions that contribute to global warming.

There will be G. Richard Wagoner Jr., chairman and chief executive officer of General Motors; William Clay Ford Jr., executive chairman of Ford; Jim Press, president of Toyota's North American operations; Tom LaSorda, chief executive officer of the Chrysler Group of DaimlerChrysler; and, for good measure, Ron Gettelfinger, president of the beleaguered United Auto Workers union.

There will be a number of environmentalists and "public interest" Washington lobbyists on hand. If not speaking before your committee, they will saturate the audience, or crowd the lobby outside of your hearing room handing out news releases, spinning the meaning of whatever is being said or left unsaid in testimony.

Members of your committee and lobbyists for and against increased fuel economy already are pumping the media, getting them ready for what the Detroit News has described as a slap-fest in which the "Big 3 face heat in D.C. over global warming," as if Detroit car companies alone caused global warming, as if Toyota, Honda or other foreign automobile manufacturers had absolutely nothing to do with it, as if Congress had nothing to do with it, but, mostly, as if American consumers were complete innocents in the matter.

There will be grandstanding aplenty, performances worthy of another Academy Award such as the one Hollywood gave former vice president Al Gore for his seminal, monumental, earth-shaking documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore himself will be on Capitol Hill spreading the gospel about improving the stewardship of our earthly resources.

It all will be great and noble fun. But here's betting that it will be meaningless, and here's why: As I've said in this space many times, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, neither the environmentalists who champion increased fuel economy nor the few industrial recalcitrants who continue to oppose it, not Al Gore or any of his Hollywood cronies, not liberals or conservatives are willing to demand that American consumers do anything or pay anything extra to bring about decreased dependence on oil and all of the attendant environmental and national security benefits that could follow.

In a word, honorable salons, absent any call for consumers to play a real and perhaps painful part in curbing America's insatiable appetite for oil and helping to reduce global warming, your upcoming hearings will yield baloney.

I am writing to you from a country where the price of unleaded regular gasoline last week was $5 a gallon -- and 27 to nearly 40 cents a gallon higher in some cities. In neighboring France, Italy, Germany, Austria, prices for regular unleaded were running as high as $7 a gallon. Those prices did not stem from oil company gouging. They were the result of public policy -- high taxes on gasoline to curb consumption.

Guess what, your honors? It works. Fuel-efficient cars and trucks are plentiful here because they make economic common sense to the consumers who buy them. Mandatory stickers on new vehicles that show global warming-causing carbon emissions in terms of grams per kilometer make sense to consumers here, because most of them accept that global warming is real. (It's been an especially warm winter in Switzerland. Many ski resort operators are feeling pinched.) European consumers tend to be careful about buying vehicles with unnecessarily high horsepower. Why? Well, high taxes on gasoline for one. There also are taxes on things such as engine displacement. The bigger and more powerful your engine, the more you pay. So the little three-cylinder, 51 horsepower Chevrolet Matiz car I wrote about in today's On Wheels column makes lots of sense to many Europeans.

I could go on. For example, I could point out that you will pay less to park a small car in Rome than you'll pay to park a much larger vehicle. You'll pay extra to drive into central London during rush hours, because city officials believe that reducing congested, go-nowhere, engine-idling traffic reduces fuel consumption and air pollution. All of those actions stem from public policies in which consumers have been asked to do as much as corporations to improve the environment.

It took guts to put those policies into place, the kind that have been missing on Capitol Hill. The absence of such courage has led to the blame-shifting game represented by America's version of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) in which corporations are asked to do everything to solve the problem and consumers are excused from contributing to the solution.

That approach has inspired the kind of silliness reflected in the recently reported, widely quoted comments of Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's global warming program, who likens the forthcoming appearances of automotive executives before you to those famed congressional hearings featuring America's once powerful, now chastised and humbled tobacco companies.

Said Becker of the automobile manufacturers: "Do they blame the victim? Or do they say: 'Okay, we'll do our fair share' [to improve fuel economy and reduce global warming]?"

Or, asked Becker, do the automakers resist the expected congressional entreaties and demands to improve fuel economy "and become the pariah the tobacco industry became?"

My response to Becker and to you is this: All victims are not inherently virtuous by virtue of their supposed victimization, especially if they have contributed mightily to their circumstance. And American consumers, drunk on cheap gasoline, faithful to the catechism that bigger is always better, wedded to the misguided notion that more is never enough, have contributed mightily to our looming energy and environmental crises.

If your hearings do nothing to address that fault, if you simply play for the newspaper headlines and top billing on the evening news programs with condemnations of the Big Three, your hearings will be worthless.