It’s good to finally know why the president is against raising federally mandated “CAFE” fuel standards. As the paper explains, it’s because he’s worried about crushing the little people:

Raising the number from the current 27.5 miles per gallon would cause hundreds more highway deaths each year because automakers would meet the goal by moving to smaller cars, the administration argues.

I’m sure they’ve got some numbers to support that, and I’m sure those numbers are not at all cooked. It does make some intuitive sense, when you think about 2005’s Yukons driving over 2007’s Yarises. But with a president who’s not known for thinking ahead about unintended consequences of governmental action (see: Iraq), his concern here is just a teensy bit suspicious.

If a downturn in average vehicle size means a bloodbath for drivers in newer, smaller cars, what about an upturn like we saw in the 90s? Doesn’t that make for untimely death inside the older, smaller cars? What happens to the overall fatality rate in each case?

Looking at big vs. small car carnage through the CAFE lens does not elucidate the problem, to say the least. A more obvious remedy would be to cap the maximum curb weight of passenger vehicles at 5,000 lbs. With personal tanks limited to a less destructive mass (but still huge), you could talk about a net savings of thousands of statistical lives. Holy moly!

But we actually agree on something, the Bush administration and I: CAFE sucks. They don’t like it because it slows down their plan to turn the country into a very large parking lot. To “fix” it, they would make the regulations more complicated and remove what little downward pressure they have on vehicle size.

Me, I don’t like CAFE because it’s already too complicated and feels vaguely Maoist. The government shouldn’t demand that the average be some number. It doesn’t work well anyway. Loopholes are found and exploited, plenty of time is wasted just complying with the mandate, and monstrosities like the PT Cruiser “truck” are forged. My solution is very simple: higher gas taxes. (Except we’re calling them carbon taxes because it focus-groups better.) As we saw with the high gas prices of the last two summers, market demand for more efficiency is a hell of a lot more effective than half-assed government regulation.

The best thing about a carbon tax is that, unlike a Maoist efficiency mandate, it encourages less driving. Less driving is like having the ability to magically make cars more efficient, except it is real. And here’s the part that should be interesting for Republicans wringing their hands about the small new cars their SUVs are running over: less driving means fewer driving fatalities. It’s the automobile bureaucracy’s best-kept secret. When they want to claim that this or that bad behavior has lead to an increase in car carnage, all they have to do is not divide fatalities by the number of total miles driven. See, deaths went up! (Again.)

Every second spent behind the wheel represents a minuscule possibility of an accident, so minuscule that we stupid humans discount it entirely when planning trips to the grocery store or across the country. But that tiny possibility is ultimately responsible for every single highway death.

We’d rather blame alcohol, cell phone use, old people, young people, ethnicity xyz, or anything else we don’t think applies to us personally. But the truth is that driving kills. Less driving makes for less killing. You’ve got other ways that might make driving kill less? Fine, try them too, but nothing will reduce deaths caused by driving as surely and predictably as doing it less.

That is why I will be so pleased to hear Mr. Bush voice his courageous support for a carbon tax at this evening’s State of the Union. (Later we can save even more lives by sensibly charging for insurance by the mile, but we’ll have to wean our country off cars one step at a time.)