You forgot something. They also increased spending. On top of that they made a lame attempt at green washing it by `promoting carpooling'. More garbage legislation out of our broken federal government. We're way overdue for a revolution.

-mt

There is no point in increasing CAFE. It doesn't work anyway. Manufacturers can buy their way out of if it. Its just a a distraction from the real issue: CO2 emissions. Tax new cars based on CO2/mile like they do in the UK. Then we'll get somewhere.

Let's see. Twenty + new polluting refineries, built according to relaxed standards, could mean that more V-8, V-10 and V-12, 3-Ton 4 x 4 will be coming soon? We will burn more and more of this back stuff till we choke. Only one problem left unsolved, where is it all going to come from? Will two or three more OIL wars do it? Will the average american realize that he/she is being led in the wrong path? Making more and more polluting fuel available is not the right answer to the USA medium and long term clean energy shortage. Vehicles capable of 60 + miles per gallon instead of the present 20 would void the requirements for 20 + new refineries, progressively reduce pollution by 75%+, reduce smogs and hurricanes and reduce OIL imports from OPEP countries to zero. Now, who doesn't want that common sense cleaner approach? Guess who!

PS: Light weight cars capable of 60 miles per gallon are a reality in Asia and Europe. Cleaner Plug-ins or PHEVs capable of 180 miles per gallons could be on the road within 3 years. Cheap and plentiful gas will delay the introduction of greener vehicles in the USA for an extended period. However, Asia and Europe will innovate and make the required transition and probably squeeze the Big Three completely out of the world market.

I was at a half-day conference at which Matt Simmons spoke, and his take on it was that despite peak oil, we really do need to invest in refineries. Many of them are quite old and sorely need to be replaced.

Now having the Congress throw more money at the oil companies to build more makes no sense. That's another matter entirely.

No the fact is the old cafe standard was a mess as it ent by entire fleet wide and none of the american car makers were ever a full range car maker.

Gm and fords benifits to its workers were nd were forced to stay based on the old model of them being more truck companies and thus able to afford an extra 2-3000 per unit. But when cafe fubared it up it made a mess of things.

Now they are trying to change cafe so it no longer will screw up that way but until they fully do so they are realy hard pressed to change the mil;age standards all that much.

Now the saner smarter cafe standard actauly manages to get the milage up a fair bit more then the old standard would have.

And to make everything even more silly its nearing the end of oil anyway so the gov realy doesnt want to tank one or more of the big three and take on the huge pension load they carry just to up some cafe stanard vy an ammount that wont change the fact we are going to have climate change this century.

In short they arnt gona tank the car companies and take a HUGE ass hit when the pensions fails AND a huge ass number of union jobs NOT just at the car makers but everywhere along the damn line of stuff made for the damn cars goes tits the bloody hell up just because you have a stick up your ass about suvs.

Ya right think happy thoughts.

Actauly bush wants a seprate refinery for the military and he also wants to spread out the refineries and get some excess capacity in there so this sort of thing doesnt happen again.

Hes not trying to lower gas prices and bring back the age of suvs.

In fact I dare say the oil companies and bush planned this all along nd have done more for fuel eff car sales then anyone. The oil cpmanies definetly were planning on oil prices sparking conservation. In fact they just said so.