New fuel efficiency standards could cure foreign oil addiction
Mark Clayton | The Christian Science Monitor | Jul 29, 2011
President Obama on Friday unveiled a new set of vehicle fuel-efficiency standards that put the US auto industry on track to achieve a fleet average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 – a big step toward cutting oil imports and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, energy experts and environmentalists say.
“This is a big deal,” Andrew Holland, senior fellow with the American Security Project, a bipartisan public-policy and research organization, wrote on his blog. “It is important that the United States as a whole uses less oil because the sheer volume of oil imports harms American competitiveness and drives down the value of the dollar.”
The US spent at least $680 billion on oil imports in 2010, he writes. Without those imports, the US trade deficit of $497 billion in 2010 “would not have existed.” He continues, “That capital could be used for investment at home, and the export of that capital had the effect of driving down the value of the dollar.”
