Do you really think by 2020 they can’t get the average up to 35 mpg though? This is the push the auto makers need to get serious about fuel consumption.
Normally I’m all for letting capitalism regulate something like this, but the problem is @3.xx a gallon the current offerings for “fuel miser” vehicles aren’t worth the trade off. The capitalist plan would be to wait until gas hits $5+ a gallon, at which point many people would jump to more fuel efficient vehicles. This would drive the market to invest more in their design and development but at $5 a gallon I think our economy would collapse.
I really don’t give a damn about changing our per car CO2 output. Just last week we saw that the climate models the global warming people are using to predict the future can’t even predict the past. What I would like to see is our demand for oil go down so we could tell the Ahmadinejads and Chavezs of the world to go fuck themselves.