Trump’s action was about more than fuel economy

In fact, Americans were paying exactly the price they were willing to pay for electric vehicles, most of which worked pretty well. The problem: The price they were paying was tens of thousands of dollars less than the cost of building them. Moreover, to minimize their losses, manufacturers focused on large, luxurious EVs whose life-cycle emissions were virtually guaranteed to be greater than the cars they were supposedly displacing.

But this was all in a day’s work for CAFE, or the corporate average fuel economy rules, enacted in 1975. Many jobs have been assigned them—saving gasoline, reducing air pollution, preserving small car production in domestic factories. But however you defined the problem, Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution quipped decades ago, CAFE was not the solution.

I’ve often looked back on Barack Obama’s 2007 Detroit speech as a landmark in America’s detour into epoch-making stupidity. The pending bankruptcy of the Big Three, he explained, was due to their insistence on making cars that consumers wanted that were profitable.

They were failing, he said, because they resisted fuel-economy rules requiring them to build cars that lost money.

Mr. Obama, who was then introducing himself for presidential consideration, obviously knew what he was doing, advancing his career by stating nonsense. The nonsense has continued, with the New York Times complaining last month that the Trump action scuttles a Biden program that would have cut gasoline prices and emissions at the same time.

Notice the contradiction? Lower gas prices actually mean higher emissions. The same claptrap was used to peddle Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Now the results are in: As economics would have predicted, subsidizing green energy doesn’t decrease emissions; it’s associated only with increased energy consumption overall.

Which brings us to the true significance of America’s decadeslong fuel-economy folly, which endures no matter how cogently it has been criticized. The problem begins with the term “fuel economy," or how much gasoline a given vehicle, regardless of other attributes, uses getting from point A to B.

Apply a sounder concept, fuel efficiency: Today’s Honda Civic gets better mileage than 1985’s, in a car 37% heavier (largely thanks to safety improvements) that produces double the horsepower.

Lesson? Fuel-efficiency gains are self-evidently obtainable, driven by technology and market demand. Want consumers to deploy these gains to cut overall fuel consumption rather than award themselves bigger, more powerful cars? Raise the gasoline price with a tax. Worried you won’t win that argument? That’s still not a reason for a “second best" policy that accomplishes no real goal except to distort market choices in favor of lighter vehicles that have been estimated to kill 3,000-plus motorists a year.

How we got here seems to me partly a media failure. In criticizing Netflix’s recent nuclear war movie, “A House of Dynamite," I neglected to mention its screenwriter, Noah Oppenheim, previously served as president of NBC News at the very moment its MSNBC unit was making a fool of itself over the Steele dossier.

This strikes me as significant. After all, we rely on a truth-seeking press to save us from governmental stupidity. Mr. Oppenheim calls his movie “journalism," but the term is correct only if he means a stringing-together of narrative conceits to meet the journalist’s emotional needs. It’s correct if he means a product that ends up lacking what the great Walter Lippmann once called “a sense of evidence."

There’s a lot of such “journalism" around. This perhaps makes it easier to appreciate an irony. It was Mr. Trump, of all people, doing the job of responsible government and discontinuing a fuel-economy policy that produced only perverse and negative consequences for 50 years. It was Mr. Trump who finally fixed it—Mr. Trump whose accidental preferment itself was partly the consequence of idiotic acts by media and government types trying to keep him out of the presidency.

Writing in his Substack, the former Time and Newsweek columnist Joe Klein, an open-eyed liberal, points out this week: “The mainstream press, like the Democrats, think a government program has ‘succeeded’ when the bill is passed and the funding distributed. Rarely do we ask: is this well-managed, well-conceived? Does it actually work?"

Don’t ask that question long enough and democracy’s answer is likely to be a Donald Trump.