Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast

Today is Thursday, May 24th. I'm your host Anastasia Yugova.

Cato Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor has been taking the administration to task for espousing the use of ethanol for fuel and tightening emission standards.

But is President Bush's environmental policy a lot of hot air?

Absolutely Jerry argues in a recent opinion piece in National Review Online entitled

Dumber By the Day.

Jerry is my guest for today's podcast.

The president wants to significantly tighten automobile fuel efficiency standards and increase

ethanol consumption, but you disagree with this.

Why?

Well I don't think the government needs to do anything to

encourage people to conserve if you look at auto sales last year in the United

States. The average car sold from new car lots in 2006, got about 31 miles per gallon, which is better than the federal

standard of 27.5 in the automotive fuel efficiency standards that we have in law.

So the fact is people would conserve and it makes sense for them

to conserve they don't need a government to tell them to do that. In fact we've

got plenty of economic studies from Molly Espy for instance of Clemson

who's looked at consumer buying habits and she found the consumers actually

overvalue fuel efficiency they don't undervalue fuel efficiency when they're

shopping for a car so the idea that the federal government needs to tell us to

conserve energy is silly.

Perhaps people are willing to buy fuel in the form of ethanol at a higher price point to gain an environmental

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