FC: Replies to "Raise fuel efficiency standards, kill Americans?"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech message:

"Raise fuel efficiency standards, kill Americans?"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03256.html

Naturally I will forward a reply from the folks at Cato.

-Declan

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From: Fred Heutte <phred () sunlightdata com>
To: <declan () well com>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:56:03 -0800
Subject: Re: FC: Raise fuel efficiency standards, kill Americans?

As you may know, Declan, the fuel efficiency/safety debate in the current
Senate energy bill fight is not as one-sided as Cato would prefer to believe.
There is credible evidence that raising CAFE standards would have *no*
effect on safety, or possibly even improve it.

In fact, the trends in auto safety and efficiency have been going in
opposite directions over the last four decades, as noted in a paper
by David Greene from Oak Ridge National Lab at a California vehicle
efficiency workshop last September.  He presented a simple chart showing
auto fleet fuel efficiency and fatalities from the late 1960s to now.
In general, travel has become safer over that period, while fuel
efficiency rose from 1975 to 1985 and has since stalled.  He concludes:

  From 1967-99, there is NO correlation between
  light-duty vehicle mpg and highway fatalities.
  ZERO, NONE.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/fuels/petroleum_dependence/documents/AB2076_workshop/David_Greene.ppt

Years of research and dozens of papers have shown that factors leading
to increased collisions, injuries and fatalities have to do with
vehicle weight *differentials* and driving speed *differentials*
(particularly for highway driving).

In that sense, the greater number of "light trucks" (SUVs in particular)
has increased the probability and severity of crashes and injuries, as
has reduced regulation of highway driving speeds.  When speed differentials
on highways are 20 mph and greater -- as they are on virtually all major
highways these days (at least ones that aren't in rush hour gridlock!) --
this means greater potential for collisions.

But the more important issue for the moment is vehicle weights.  Opponents
of increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards have used this issue in the
most transparently slipshod way.  The National Academy of Sciences report
on CAFE last year -- drafted by a lopsidedly industry-leaning panel and
then revised *after* peer review when the auto makers complained that it
still wasn't the result they wanted -- refers primarily to just *one*
study out of literally dozens that have been done on the issue, and it
mis-states the conclusions of that study.

The Union of Concerned Scientists "Drilling in Detroit" report last summer
concluded, on the other hand:

  Automakers can utilize a variety of design and technology
  options for reducing fuel consumption. The only one that could
  have a significant impact on occupant safety during a crash,
  however, is vehicle weight reduction. The auto industry has
  argued that weight reduction compromises safety and that public
  policy should not encourage further fuel economy improvements,
  since they would lead to vehicle weight reduction (as they did
  in the period from 1977 through 1985).

  Contrary to this assumption, the relationship between safety
  and the weights of vehicles in the fleet is neither direct nor
  obvious. The factors that affect public safety on the road are
  so many and varied that actual road casualties can be only
  generally predicted. In particular, the concern over the safety
  of weight reduction is driven by the poor safety performance of
  the lighter vehicles in the fleet. This performance is
  misleading since it is partly due to two factors: (1) the
  lightest vehicles in the fleet tend to be the least expensive
  and thus incorporate the fewest safety advances, and (2)
  lighter vehicles tend to be driven by younger, more aggressive
  drivers.

  Vehicle weight reduction is a reasonable strategy for fuel
  economy improvements if it is applied most aggressively to the
  SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks used as private passenger
  vehicles. In addition, these weight reductions can be applied
  in combination with obvious and inexpensive safety
  improvements.

  Principles of elementary physics imply that in a two-vehicle
  collision, a heavier vehicle should be safer than a lighter
  one. In practice, however, that is not necessarily always the
  case. In a two vehicle crash, for example, if the heavier
  vehicle is struck in the side by the front of a lighter
  vehicle, the occupants of the heavier vehicle may be more at
  risk. Estimates show that a 10 percent reduction in vehicle
  weight could result in a 3 to 7 percent increase in fuel economy
  (NRC 1992; OTA 1991).

http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/drill_detroit.pdf

David Greene of ORNL had a parallel view in his workshop report:

  The majority view on fuel economy and safety is based on two fallacies.

  1. Because I am safer in a heavier car, everyone
     would be safer if all cars were heavier.

     From a societal perspective, there is a "larger
     vehicle" externality.

  2. Existing studies adequately account for
     spurious correlations with driver and
     environmental characteristics.

     The more carefully one controls confounding
     factors, the more the "weight effect" fades away,
     or even reverses.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/fuels/petroleum_dependence/documents/AB2076_workshop/David_Greene.ppt

Ann Mesnikoff of the Sierra Club testified to the Senate last December
and pointed out that an overlooked factor is that SUVs are inherently
less safe than other passenger vehicles due to rollover and other
problems:

  The current system of separate standards for cars and trucks,
  which has allowed manufacturers to move heavily into SUV
  production, compromises traffic safety. Light trucks pose
  safety dangers to their owners and occupants. SUVs are four
  times more likely to roll over in an accident. Rollovers
  account for 62% of SUV deaths, but only 22% in cars. Yet
  automakers fought new standards protecting occupants in
  rollover accidents. According to a study by the National Crash
  Analysis Center, an organization funded by both the government
  and the auto industry, occupants of an SUV are just as likely
  as occupants of a car to die once the vehicle is involved in an
  accident. This is in part because of their higher rollover
  rates.

http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/120601Mesnikoff.pdf

When Andrew Card, now chief of staff in the Bush White House, was
a newly minted executive at General Motors fresh from his stint running
the American Automobile Manufacturers Association (AAMA), he gave
a speech to an aluminum industry gathering where he claimed
that the auto industry could do better on fuel efficiency and safety
than government regulation.

The fact of the matter is, this simply isn't so.  The auto industry
started improving fuel efficiency when CAFE went into effect in the
1970s, and stopped when CAFE stopped going up, and spent a great deal
of effort in the 1990s to prevent it from rising from current levels.
Aggregate fleet efficiency for the 2001 model year was LESS THAN that
of the 1981 fleet.  It is incredible to think that with all the
advances in auto technology during the last 20 years, somehow they
just couldn't come up with anything for getting better gas mileage.

Likewise, safety has improved only when the car manufacturers have
been pushed by legislation and regulation.

The question of whether increased CAFE standards would have an effect
on safety is certainly a mandatory one to address.  But there is no
question that the answers have been totally politicized, and that the
real science and economics around this issue have been obscured by
political handwaving.

We *should* want both increased fuel efficiency and more safety.  There
are tradeoffs, as Senator Levin said in his floor speech in the Senate
today, but his further implication that this is a zero-sum game is
simply incorrect.  We can find a way to do both, and the best guide
is our own history between 1975 and 1985, when fuel efficiency and
safety *both* significantly improved.

Fred
Energy Coordinator
Oregon Sierra Club

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Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 18:47:20 -0700 (MST)
From: <politech () electricmindcontrol net>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: Re: FC: Raise fuel efficiency standards, kill Americans?

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> "Environmentalists who supported an expansion of CAFE standards for
> cars and light trucks are allowing their hostility to energy use to
> override their common sense.  For instance, the National Academy of
> Sciences reported last year that the current standards are directly
> responsible for the deaths of 1,300 - 2,600 motorists a year.  That's
> because automakers find that the cheapest way of incr easing fuel
> efficiency is to reduce the size and weight of the cars they sell,
> making them more dangerous to motorists in a crash. Dramatically
> expanding CAFE standards would accelerate this trend and would
> directly result in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of
> Americans.

Let me see if I have this straight.  Reducing emissions is a bad idea
because cars will become smaller, and therefore offer their occupants less
protection when they're hit by some idiot in a massive SUV.  And the
problem is the *small* cars?

You know, taxes on gasoline cause some people to ride bikes.  This tax is
directly responsible for X deaths per year, since if the cyclists had been
in a gas guzzling SUV, they'd have been better protected.


> While the costs of expanding CAFE standards is steep, the benefits
> are ephemer al.  Expanded standards certainly wouldn't reduce foreign
> oil imports.  For instance, since the CAFE standards were first
> introduced, the average fuel economy more than doubled for new cars
> and grew by more than 50 percent for new light trucks, but imported
> oil has increased from 35 to 52 percent of U.S. consumptio n. Reducing
> oil demand would remove the most expensive oil sources from the mar
> ket first, and foreign oil is the cheapest oil supply source in the
> world. Dome stic producers, not foreign oil producers, would be hit
> hardest if gasoline demand were to decline.

I especially like the reasoning that the primary motivation for emissions
controls is to reduce oil exports.  Silly me, I thought we were trying to
reduce emissions, with the bonus of curbing consumption.  However, the
observation that domestic oil producers would be hardest hit certainly
clears up why the the increase didn't get very far in the senate.

-Tim

**********

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 20:36:03 -0500
From: Jamie McCarthy <jamie () mccarthy vg>
Subject: Re: FC: Raise fuel efficiency standards, kill Americans?
To: declan () well com

declan () well com (Declan McCullagh) writes:

> For instance, the National Academy of Sciences reported last
> year that the current standards are directly responsible for the
> deaths of 1,300 - 2,600 motorists a year.

This is yet more CATO propaganda, Declan, and you're doing your
readers a disservice by disseminating it uncritically.  The truth
took me about twenty minutes to find.

Here's the National Academy of Sciences press release summarizing
their report:

   http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/0309076013?OpenDocument

   "But one risk of downsizing is that smaller cars involved in
   crashes with larger vehicles tend to have higher numbers of
   fatalities.  The committee estimated that the downsizing of
   automobiles in the 1970s and 1980s -- whether a result of CAFE
   standards or other market-driven needs -- may have contributed
   an additional 1,300 to 2,600 fatalities in 1993.  However, this
   area is quite controversial among analysts and the report
   includes a dissenting opinion written by two committee
   members.  They believe that the relationship between fuel
   economy and safety is not yet fully understood, and a
   reduction in vehicle weight need not adversely affect safety.
   The committee feels more analysis in this area is warranted
   and calls on the National Highway Traffic Safety
   Administration to conduct further research."

Look at the language.  "Estimated"... "may have"... "contributed"...
"controversial"... "dissenting opinion"... this couldn't be more
hesitant and qualified.

In fact the report itself says at the start of its chapter 2:

   "Isolating the effects of CAFE from other factors affecting
   U.S. light-duty vehicles over the past 25 years is a difficult
   analytical task."

Are cars lighter now than they were in 1976 because of CAFE?
Because people prefer smaller cars?  Or just because times are tight
and people can only afford smaller cars?  The NAS refuses to
speculate.

On the page where the report references the "1,300 to 2,600
fatalities" figure, the word "CAFE" does not even appear!  The NAS
is simply playing a game of what-if with car weight:

   "The April 1997 NHTSA analyses allow the committee to reestimate
   the approximate effect of downsizing the fleet between the
   mid-1970s and 1993.  In 1976, cars were about 700 lb heavier
   than in 1993;  light trucks were about 300 lb heavier, on
   average.  An increase in mass for cars and light-duty trucks on
   the road in 1993, returning them to the average weight in 1976,
   would be estimated to have saved about 2,100 lives in car
   crashes and cost about 100 fatalities in light-truck crashes.
   The net effect is an estimated 2,000 fewer fatalities in 1993,
   if cars and light trucks weighed the same as in 1976.  The
   95 percent confidence interval for this estimate suggests that
   there was only a small chance that the safety cost was smaller
   than 1,300 lives or greater then 2,600 lives."

You can trust the statistical hypothetical or not (read the report
for more details on how it's drawn).  But CAFE is nowhere
assigned responsibility for these numbers, and the NAS
_explicitly_ refuses to draw such a connection.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute picked this up and ran with it.
They ran a poll in which they dishonestly summarized those findings
and then asked people, basically, "would you still support CAFE now
that you know it kills thousands of people"?  Forty-eight percent
still said "yes" (!) but they ran a story in National Review calling
this a victory over the evil federal regulators and so on.

CEI at least kept a tenuous grip on reality, always carefully
sticking to the weasel-words "contributed to" -- which if you think
about it carefully disclaims any knowledge of the magnitude of the
contribution.

But CATO owes you and your readers an apology for an outright lie;
there is simply no way to reconcile the actual NAS report with the
words CATO attributed to them:

   "the current [CAFE] standards are directly responsible for the
   deaths of 1,300 - 2,600 motorists a year."

Going to primary sources is always important when your news is being
fed to you by "think-tanks" which have a vested interest in
spreading anti-regulatory, pro-corporate propaganda.  You can read
the NAS report here:

   http://books.nap.edu/books/0309076013/html/index.html

The "1,300 to 2,600 lives" reasoning starts here:

   http://books.nap.edu/books/0309076013/html/26.html

And the eight-page, carefully reasoned dissenting opinion starts here:

   http://books.nap.edu/books/0309076013/html/117.html

   "Improving fuel economy could be marginally helpful, beneficial,
   or have no impact on highway safety.  The conclusions of the
   majority of the committee stated in Chapters 2 and 4 are overly
   simplistic and at least partially incorrect.  [...]

   "The first [fallacy] results from the very intuitive, thoroughly
   documented (e.g., Evans, 1992, chapter 4, and many others), and
   theoretically predictable fact that in a collision between two
   vehicles of unequal weight, the occupants of the lighter vehicle
   are at greater risk.  The fallacy lies in reasoning that,
   therefore, reducing the mass of all vehicles will increase risks
   in collisions between vehicles.  [...]

   "The second fallacy arises from failing to adequately account for
   confounding factors and consequently drawing conclusions from
   spurious correlations.  In analyzing real crashes, it is
   generally very difficult to sort out 'vehicle' effects from
   driver behavior and environmental conditions.  Because the driver
   is generally a far more important determinant of crash
   occurrences than the vehicle and a significant factor in the
   outcomes, even small confounding errors can lead to seriously
   erroneous results.  [...]

   "Kahane's results (1997) suggest that in car-to-car or light
   truck-to-light truck collisions, if both vehicles are lighter,
   fatalities are reduced.  The signs of the two coefficients
   quantifying these effects are consistent for the two vehicle
   types, but neither is statistically significant.  Focusing on the
   crashworthiness and aggressivity of passenger cars and light
   trucks in collisions with each other, Joksch et al. (1998)
   studies fatal accidents from 1991 to 1994 and found stronger
   confirmation for the concept that more weight was, in fact,
   harmful to safety.  [...]  Studies like those of Kahane (1997)
   and Joksch et al. (1998) that take greater pains to account for
   confounding factors appear to be less likely to find that
   reducing weight is detrimental to highway safety in vehicle-to-
   vehicle crashes than studies that make little or no attempt to
   control for confounding factors.  This suggests to us that
   confounding factors are present and capable of changing the
   direction of a study's conclusions."
--
 Jamie McCarthy
 jamie () mccarthy vg

**********

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 19:31:42 -0500
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
From: Mike Godwin <mnemonic () well com>
Subject: Re: FC: Raise fuel efficiency standards, kill Americans?

Drive an SUV! Save lives!

**********




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