Senator Talent allegedly represents me. He is allegedly a thinking man. He allegedly cares about our country.
Senator Jim Talent sends me an email newsletter every month or so. His current newsletter says this about Iraq:
As day-to-day life there improves, my hope is that more Iraqis will view the liberation of Iraq and the ongoing political progress as a turning point for Iraqi society.
When was that written, I wonder? Two years ago? Three years ago?
What else has Senator Jim Talent been up to? [If you’re wondering why I always say “Senator Jim Talent,” I’m hoping that it will make this article more search-engine-friendly than not saying “Senator Jim Talent. After all, Senator Jim Talent is facing an election in November].
Senator Jim Talent does prominently announce some things. He’s so upset that payday loan shops are so incredibly evil (with their 500% interest loans) that he has announced that he is supporting a bill so that would require payday lenders to offer reduced loan rates, but only to members of the military. Screw everyone else, I suppose. [1] I guess it never occurred to Senator Jim Talent that we should pay members of the military decent wages so they don’t have to desperately walk up to the counters of the payday lenders. Senator Jim Talent is also against promising new forms of stem cell research, but he somehow forgets to put it prominently in his newsletter that he prefers to let real children die in order to protect microscopic un-implanted unfertilized embryos. [2] So you can see that Senator Talent and I have many points of disagreement.
On a lark, I sent Senator Jim Talent an email asking him to explain why we don’t change federal standards to require cars to be more fuel efficient. Straight-forward enough?
In response, I received this letter: Re Increase the miles per gallon standards.txt [3] . As you can see, Senator Jim Talent mentions NOTHING about the fuel standards for motor vehicles. Nada. Zero. Is it because it’s just not American to use fuel efficiently? I think so. Republicans don’t tolerate people messing with their right to choose bloated vehicles (Republicans are protective of automobile choices the way that Democrats are protective of reproductive choices).
If you check out Senator Jim Talent’s letter to me, you’ll see that he can’t get himself to even mention fuel efficiency. I know that Republicans are math-challenged (note the immoral budget deficits and trade deficits we are running), but I thought they at least understood the relationship between supply and demand. Their constituents are begging for cheaper gas, right? What’s a good way to lower the cost of gas? The answer: Make more efficient vehicles, thereby lowering the demand for gas, therefore reducing the price of gas. But no. Senator Jim Talent won’t dare to consider the issue of raising fuel efficiency standards, even when I ask for his position on that exact topic with a simple question. You won’t find a single word about improving vehicle gas efficiency anywhere on Senator Jim Talent’s entire website. [4]
So what did Senator Jim Talent discuss in the letter he sent to me? The answer: Ethanol. Talent claims in his letter that ethanol would “reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy and lower the price of gasoline.” Really? Not according to the October 2007 issue of Consumer Reports:
Consumer’s Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, is an independent organization. Here are the conclusions of the CR article:
- Ethanol is unlikely to fill more than a small percentage of U.S. energy needs.
- Ethanol fuel is less polluting than gasoline, but provides fewer miles per gallon, costs more and is hard to find outside of the Midwest.
How much less fuel efficient is ethanol? “The fuel economy of the Tahoe dropped 27% when running on E85 compared with gasoline, from an already low 14 mpg overall to 10 mpg (rounded to the nearest mpg). This is the lowest fuel mileage we’ve gotten from any vehicle in recent years.”
But there’s more bad news according to CR. Government support for ethanol is “indirectly causing more gasoline consumption rather than less.”
Therefore, an independent association says ethanol is not much of an answer. Senator Jim Talent politics standing in corn fields and says otherwise. Who do you believe?
Finally, do you think it’s possible that we could save immense amounts of fuel by discouraging the production of wasteful vehicles like the Tahoe by raising U.S. fuel efficiency standards? I do. So does The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. [5] Here’s what they have to say:
Raising CAFE standards by 5% annually until 2012 and by 3% per year thereafter could save 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (MBD) by 2010, 4.7 MBD by 2020, and 67 billion barrels of oil over the next 40 years. This is 10–20 times greater than the potential oil supply from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
You know, this post is starting to sound like yet another warning that corporate money has completely corrupted the American political system. See here [1] and here [6] and here [7].
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