Fuel Economy Standard ‘Kills People’

The Obama administration on July 29 announced a new fuel economy standard that requires automakers to boost their fleets’ miles per gallon by 5 percent a year until they reach 54.5 mpg by 2025.

The standard is designed to save thousands of dollars in fuel costs over the life of a vehicle, but critics say it will have another effect: a rise in motor vehicle deaths.

The president reportedly has secured agreements from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda and Hyundai to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) to 35.6 in 2016 and to the higher figure nine years later, although the standard will be reviewed in 2018.

To increase their vehicles’ fuel economy, automakers will have to reduce their weight.

“So prepare to say goodbye to sport utility vehicles, pickups and minivans, the very vehicles millions of American families and businesses must rely upon every day,” the Washington Examiner observed in an editorial.

“By far the worst result, however, will be the fact that thousands will die because Obama, fanatical Big Green environmentalists, and their allies in the federal bureaucracy care more about removing micro-amounts of emissions than they do about the safety and convenience of people on the roads.”

Sam Kazman, general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit think tank, called CAFE “a regulation that, plain and simple, kills people.”

A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study in 2003 estimated that for every 100 pounds of weight removed from a car weighing under 3,000 pounds, the death rate rises more than 5 percent.

A study by the National Academy of Science found that lighter vehicles required to satisfy CAFE — which was first enacted in 1975 — were responsible for up to 2,600 highway deaths a year.

And data from the government’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, analyzed by USA Today, concluded that 7,700 people died for every one additional mpg attributed to CAFE regulation.

The Examiner concludes: “If CAFE standards were produced by a public corporation or small business instead of the federal government, the families of those killed by the regulations would have a prima facie case for a class-action lawsuit.”

FROM NEWSMAX.COM:  http://www.newsmax.com/