Another group has slid between the sheets of the strange bedfellows club supporting drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In addition to the Teamsters, the Bush administration has enlisted veterans' groups -- including the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and AMVETS -- in its push to tap ANWR. The connection, you may wonder? As the argument goes, domestic oil production lessens our dependence on imported oil, which thus reduces the need for our boys to go abroad and die defending US oil interests. And that's something veterans, who know the hell of war, can support. Right?
The veterans' groups met recently with Bush and Interior Secretary Gale Norton at the White House, along with Senators John Breaux (D-Louisiana) and Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska), a vocal proponent of Alaskan drilling. In the meeting, Murkowski likened support for opening ANWR to his recent vote against raising fuel-efficiency standards, saying both were ultimately about "saving lives." Murkowski and other opponents of tightening the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards argue that the increase would result in lighter cars, leading to more highway deaths.
But somehow, no one seems to have asked Murkowski how curtailing oil imports will save lives if we accomplish it through drilling in the arctic, but won't save them if we reduce demand through making cars more efficient. After all, besides cutting greenhouse gases, tougher CAFE standards would lessen our hunger for all oil -- whether domestic or foreign -- far more than would extracting a few million barrels from Alaska. Are Bush and friends just betting the veterans won't catch wind of the fuel-economy debate and switch sides?
This issue of "saving lives" goes deeper than simply catching a GOP rank-and-filer in a glaring inconsistency. In a White House report released on March 20, the administration called for a "science-based" approach to policy decisions. Yet the science employed by opponents of boosted fuel-economy standards leaves environmentalists and even some automakers scratching their heads. For example, while pro-industry lawmakers like Murkowski paint ominous pictures of highway carnage involving lightweight cars that crumple on contact, a 2001 report released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (click "fuel efficient vehicles," then "Cars and SUVs," then "Greener SUVs") claims that many structural and design changes could be made that would increase fuel efficiency without compromising safety. The group even used its own recommendations to design a Ford Explorer with 50 percent greater fuel economy and improved zero-to-60 performance.
Honda has released a report containing evidence that it could make its cars significantly lighter while retaining its stellar safety record. Indeed, as Public Citizen head Joan Claybrook pointed out in her recent testimony to the Senate, it is often the disparity between vehicle weights in a crash (say, between an SUV and a convertible) that cause deaths, not the actual weights of the vehicles themselves.
So if increasing CAFE standards can be done bloodlessly, let's consider what happens if they aren't raised. For one thing, vehicle emissions will certainly remain at or close to current levels for the foreseeable future. And even setting aside the overarching question of planetary survival in an ever more noxious bath of greenhouse gases, air pollution has been scientifically shown to kill people. In the latest demonstration of this well-known fact, a 10-year study released recently by the California Air Resources Board shows a direct relationship between air pollution and asthma, which currently afflicts an estimated 4.8 million children. Pollution not only aggravates this deadly disease, which kills over 5,000 people per year and has experienced a 75 percent increase since 1980, it causes the illness, according to the study. So it seems like a simple equation: Lower CAFE standards mean more pollution, which in turn means more dead people, especially kids.
Sadly, claiming that lives will be saved by measures that actually have the opposite effect dovetails with other related examples of Bush doublespeak on the environmental front. Take his new "Clear Skies" initiative, which will effectively gut the Clean Air Act. Besides stripping any mention of carbon dioxide emissions, the new legislation would reduce "greenhouse gas intensity" by 18 percent over the next 10 years. That's not greenhouse gases, mind you, but rather the ratio of greenhouse gases to the growth of the U.S. economy. Pretty arbitrary grounds on which to build a national environmental policy.
Then again, if these policies seem to demonstrate a cavalier attitude toward human survival, it may be because the Bush administration considers the question of "saving lives" itself to be a little retro. Or at least, that seems to be the upshot of its aforementioned report on "sound science," which also stresses the importance of thinking in terms of "life years" saved, not "lives." In other words, saving a child can be considered more important than saving a senior citizen because, in weighing costs and benefits, a child has many more potential "life years" left to live.
It's a distinction the Veterans of Foreign Wars might wish to note.
