Nathan, I'm a little less optimistic than you. I think China's action has more to do with protecting Asian automakers than energy policy. If you go back through all the CAFE debates on the Hill, US automakers balked at new minimums because they wouldn't be able to compete with the (mostly) Japanese makers. I'm no expert, but I can't think of any other time that China has put the environment over any other interests.

And this would be a quick way to disadvantage the American makers - especially since the market only market they can hope to compete in is the truck and SUV market.

It may serve both purposes, but I think China is looking at the fact that with rising populations, it will choke and die on pollution and energy dependency if they don't get a handle on the problem as soon as possible.

It also helps that, to my knowledge, China has no domestic oil industry to speak of. Every dollar (or yuan or whatever) spent on gasoline is a dollar of precious foreign currency gone forever. And of course this means no internal lobbying against high standards.

My only question is what took them so long?

MarkJL, why possible reason could the Chinese have for favoring the historically hated Japanese over Americans?

Just doesn't parse out.

And China does pay a lot of attention to the environment, maybe not in a way us tree-huggers would always appreciate. They may not care if an individual citizen lives or dies, but they don't want to lose more productivity thru black lung disease than they make up with cheap steel.

And KBS points out an resources argument, too.

The biggest example (in all senses) is Three Gorges Dam, whose output is supposed to replace a lot of burnt coal. That's the FIRST argument the Chinese always give for it to Westerners. Whether it's was the top of their internal list of justifications or not no one can probably say. But it was sure on there.

In any case, it's the right-wing framing that we have allowed to f*ck us again. Thanks to narrow minded economists, we speak of a "regulatory burden" instead of "societal standards."

So not doing the right thing is not only going to cost us our health, but our competitiveness as well.

For example, the big problem with CAFE improvement is that the UAW is hard against it. They feel that Americans can build anything that's put in front of them. Exhibit A is the Japanese transplant factories.

But, for all the flag waving about American ingenuity and world leadership, these same red-white-and-blue Americans are not at all confident that GM/Ford can design competitive products for them to build.

How depressing.

First, the UAW has a problem with CAFE because they know that GM/Ford comliance with a tightened CAFE would mean their jobs. I've been witness to more than a few debates between labor and management within GM that clearly shows that GM compliance has more to do with R&D than with anything else - and the UAW doesn't have much clout in that arena. The UAW rank-and-file would be more than happy to make more fuel efficient cars. Of course, GM and Ford will turn around and say their just responding to consumer demand by making all these trucks and SUVs, but that's another conversation.

You may have a point about Chinese/Japanese relationships, but the reality is that of the foreign automakers already in China, it's Nissan, Volkswagon, GM, Honda, Ford and Toyota. If China does create strict CAFE-esque rules, you're clearly going to see Nissan, VW, Honda and Toyota rising to the top - they've got the fleet (and GM and Ford are pretty truck-heavy).

I'm a little troubled with your reference to the Three Gorges Dam. China may have used the argument about reducing coal-burning plants, etc., but the jury is still out on the long-term environmental consequences of that project - not to mention the millions of people who were forcibly displaced. Environmental arguments aside, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam was to create a supply of cheap power. So they have the power to run all these businesses that China is going to create as they slide inexorably towards a free-market economy. And we all know how great a free-market is for the environment. . .

Given that the only real way to lower consumption of any product is to raise the price, how about the US government simply not covering for these oil companies any more? Let them assume the risk instead of covering for Texaco with US missiles and rifles and charging the taxpayers for it. When gas reflects price of $3-4 a gallon, you can bet we'll cut our consumption.

As an electrical engineer, every energy bill this country has passed continues to aggravate me. I've had a hand in photo-voltaic cell research and I tell you we could be off fossil fuels in five years with a dedicated source of funding and manufacturing, as well as less vulnerable to terrorism (distributed vs. centralized generation). There must be a way to break this oil-driven deadlock, but I'm a scientist, not a politician.