rural dems oppose mpg?

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/democrats-climate-clash--heads-to-floor-2007-07-10.html

What the hell is a rural democrat? How is this different from an urban one? Should it be different? Seriously people, we need more than two parties.

As far as the actual story, things at work here are not bad by themselves. I'm always amazed that how public policy that has some good intentions has to be propped up by bad science and thus made easily open to attack. I don't care about GCC, but having our cars run on less gasoline makes perfect sense to me. Or having less smog in our cities and so forth. These things do not bother me. When its somehow connected to this idea that we're destroying the planet and endangering our very existence, no thanks. We're not going to save the planet by doubling the fuel efficiency of our automobiles. We might be giving our economy some breathing room, and certainly there's nothing wrong with playing it safe and finding ways to reduce pollution. I don't like pollutants anymore than the next person.

But carbon emissions aren't going to destroy the world themselves. Why we need a tax on them I don't know. Tax the gas, they're already doing that. Europeans made a concerted effort to tax the hell out of the stuff, same with Japan. Where do our fuel-efficient cars come from.. oh that's right. Europe and Japan. Shocking. It doesn't take the so called "man on the moon" idea to get our fuel addictions down to a more moderate level. It just takes some fiddling with the supply and demand. The market will provide. Keep buying Japanese cars. Eventually Detroit will either get the picture or go out of business.

Two problems. One this Dingell character is ok in criticizing the GCC crowd that seems to be 'in charge'. Who cares if they're in the same party, they're obviously not the same ideologically. But two, what the hell is 35 mpg for cars going to do? I already get that and I don't have a hybrid or a plug in (it is Japanese though). Look for something more radical as a goal. Like 60. Even if we don't make it, so what. We'd get to something more useful like 45-50 mpg as industry standard. Right now Detroit is lucky to make a car that gets over 20 IRL as opposed to the fake stickers they put on them.