Obama Motors!

By Alan Caruba

What legislators at the federal and state level don’t seem to understand is a fundamental law of thermodynamics. You cannot get more mileage out of a gallon of gasoline than it possesses. Every form of energy, oil, coal, natural gas, has a specific amount of energy it can produce when used.

When you add moonshine like ethanol to a gallon of gasoline, you actually reduce the amount of mileage you get for your dollar.

Meanwhile, the producers of the ethanol are lining their pockets with federal subsidies. Without the subsidies—taxpayer dollars—they would not be able to make a profit and since the ethanol fantasy has managed to drive up the cost of corn—normally a food product—some ethanol producers have already gone out of business because they couldn’t afford it!

California, home to more truly bad ideas about the environment than any other State, has enacted a “California Car Standard” to cut tailpipe emissions of “greenhouse gases.”

There is NO global warming and carbon dioxide has NO impact on the Earth’s climate except to show up in slightly higher amounts hundreds of years after a warming cycle has occurred. What Governor Schwarzenegger hasn’t figured out is that the Earth is well into a cooling cycle since 1998.

In California, all vehicles, cars and trucks, sold in the State will have to average 34.5 miles per gallon by 2015. Recent new standards for trucks, most of which would have to be retrofitted, means that fewer and fewer goods will be delivered in and to California because the cost of retrofitting is so high most truckers and fleet owners will simply decide to avoid doing business there.

Meanwhile, with the U.S. government imposing more and more emission demands on the auto manufacturers, they will ultimately have to start making cars out of paper mache in order to lighten the vehicle enough to achieve utterly meaingless mileage standards.

On top of that, the U.S. government is requiring automakers to make cars that very few people can afford or even want. Pretty soon we’ll have a new auto company, Obama Motors!

Isn’t it communism when the central government gets to decide what must be manufactured?

The effect of putting carbon dioxide emission limits in place on American cars ignores the fact that CO2 is being produced daily in China, India, Russia, Europe, and everywhere else in the world. Let’s not forget, too, that every human being on Earth emits about two pounds of the stuff every day.

The California standard has the effect of banning, not just SUVs, but midsize cars like the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry. Just how dumb is this?

It is interesting to note that Ford Motor Company has refused to line up for a government bailout. Back in the 1930s when the FDR administration passed a law requiring manufacturers to collude to set higher prices, Henry Ford refused to participate. He believed that competition was the best economic policy. People actually went to jail back then for selling a product or service for less than the price set.

Your President, elected by just barely 6% over the Republican candidate and accompanied by a huge Democrat majority in Congress, is pushing this nation into a deeper recession which in time, if nothing is done to reverse the process, will develop into a full blown depression.

You might want to keep this in mind in 2010 when it comes time to vote for members of Congress. Americans put the Republicans in control in 1994 and we can do it again. At this point, I would vote for a chimpanzee if it was a Republican!

The next politician who, like Al Gore, tells you that the Earth is facing a global warming calamity because of greenhouse gas emissions, should be voted out of office and into the nearest soup kitchen line.