By Paul Chesser

Hey, it was the best eye-catching headline I could come up with since my John Locke Foundation friend and former colleague Roy Cordato nailed it with, “Obama Administration Trades Blood for Oil.” As he explains:

While the country was focused on the debt extension deal being hashed out between Congress and the White House, President Obama reached an agreement with the auto industry to raise what are called Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. These are laws that mandate the average mileage that a fleet of cars sold by a particular manufacturer must achieve. Under these new rules, the fleet standard would increase to 54.5 mpg by 2025. Just for comparison, the 2011 2-passenger Smart Cart is advertising 41 mpg on the highway. The problem is that if automobiles are going to meet this standard, the auto companies will have to seriously downsize their fleet. The reason why the Smart Car even gets the mileage it does is because it’s so small and light…

Roy goes on to note that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that for every 100 lbs. reduced from a car that weighs 3,000 lbs, traffic deaths rise by 5 percent. Both the liberal Brookings Institution and the National Academy of Science — you know, one of the great scientific authorities held up by Al Gore and friends as authoritative bodies about the inevitability of catastrophic global warming due to human-caused carbon dioxide emissions — back up the NHTSA findings on traffic fatalities.

As Roy says, President Obama is undeterred. “After all, blood on the highway can be cleaned up, but once an additional amount of CO2 is released in the atmosphere, it will stay there for centuries.”