CAFE FOR POPULATION CONTROL

What CAFE does for the consumer was analyzed in a fundamental study by R.W. Crandall of the Brookings Institution and J.D. Graham of the Harvard School of Public Health. ("The effect of fuel economy standards on automobile safety," J. Law & Economics, April 1989.)

It kills him.

As the congressionally dictated gas mileages increased from 18.0 mpg in 1978 to 27.5 in 1989, the average US car became smaller and lighter. Its weight decreased from 3,877 lbs in 1970 to 3,077 in 1987, and its engine displacement decreased from 297 cc to 167 cc during the same time.

The number of traffic fatalities increased during that time: there were ups and downs, but from 1950 to 1982 the average increase was 520 fatalities per year. By itself, this does not, of course, point a finger at CAFE, for the number is subject to many factors such as speed limits, seat belts, increased opposition to drunk driving, etc. However, a careful statistical analysis can indeed extract the correlation between CAFE and highway fatalities: Crandall and Graham found CAFE responsible for between 2,200 and 3,900 excess occupant fatalities over ten years of a given model year's use. (For injuries rather than fatalities, the correlation between car size and injury rate is similar and quite indisputable.)

But at least one organization did something about it. The Com-petitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a non profit organization (233 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., Washington DC 20003, and very worthy of your support) took the matter to the US Court of Appeals, D.C., to petition against the NHTSA's rulemaking. (The latter had already come down from 27.5 mpg to 26.5 mpg for 1989, perhaps under the influence of the figures and recommendations published by the CEI).

The case is still pending, but several points are noteworthy about the oral arguments presented on Oct. 19. First of all, CAFE and its decrees were defended by its good friends, the deindustrializing killer lobbies: Public Citizen, the headquarters of Nader's corporate empire, and the Center for Automobile Safety, one of its corporate subsidiaries; and the two lobbies who have helped kill thousands by their obstruction of nuclear power: the Union of "Concerned" "Scientists" and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Missing from this crowd was Amory Lovins, who preaches free enterprise from one corner of his mouth and zealously supports CAFE from the other; he was absent because he is as well qualified as a lawyer as he is as a physicist. The thrust of these lobbies is the usual: more sham-environmentalist propaganda and more roadblocks to industry at the cost of human lives and crippled bodies.

On the bright side, the petitions and court briefs filed by CEl's Sam Kazman argue the higher traffic deaths rate by reduced car size, and use two splendid tactics. They support the argument by the very statistics and studies published by the defendant, the NHTSA (and its boss, the DoT). And they also do something for which I have long been waiting: feed the de-industrializers their own medicine. Kazman argues that the NHTSA cannot decree a change in its hazardous CAFE standard without filing an Environmental Impact Statement.