What is “CAFE” – and why? I thought I’d do a short summary, to try to explain both!
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A Little Story About MAD
Mutual Assured Destruction, that is. The US used to square off with other nuclear-armed big boys, such as the USSR. But no more. We’re too weak, too cowardly. So now, like the schoolyard bully, we beat up defenseless minnows like Venezuela:
“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.” — 8:27 AM, Nov 29, 2025
“We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” — Pete Hegseth, 6:45 PM, Nov 28, 2025
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/11/trump-pardons-drug-smuggler-threatens-venezuela.html
To our horror, Trump and Hegseth have morphed into Bush and Cheney. They are trying to do regime change, and probably preparing to bomb Venezuelan villages, just as ‘our’ troops were bombing Vietnamese villages sixty years ago (yet still, Ho-ho-ho Chi Minh cleaned our clock).
Who will stop Mad Dog Trump and his freakish little zionist ‘Christian’ sidekick Hegseth from starting another useless war of aggression?
A chart of the real, inflation-adjusted crude oil price is illuminating:
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart
It’s easy to see why the US economy grew effortlessly after WW II: the real crude oil price averaged around $3 a barrel until early 1970s — versus $60 today. Gasoline and electric power were as cheap as dirt.
If free-market capitalism actually exists, then the still relatively dear crude oil price should be sufficient on its own to cause the shift we’ve seen to smaller-displacement, higher-mileage engines — without the need for Big Gov to put its fat thumb on the scale with CAFE fines, which helped push up the cost of vehicles to their current, disastrous $50,000-plus average … and made Elon a billionaire.
But Big Gov is a totally ossified bureaucracy. Thanks to Nixon’s 1970 War on Drugs, cannabis remains federally illegal, despite nearly every state now allowing its legal sale. Likewise, Gerald Ford’s 1975 CAFE law grimly soldiers on, distorting the auto market by causing many well-liked vehicle models to be cancelled, complete with Final Editions.
How about a Final Edition of Clowngress, in which not only MTG but all 535 of them resign? The Capitol building would make a fine shopping mall; the House and Senate chambers would be excellent intimate venues for live entertainment, as the guitars twang and a redolent haze of cannabis smoke fills the air.
Your Senator don’t dance
And your Congressman don’t rock and roll
When evening rolls around
And it’s time to go to town
Where do you go
To rock and roll?
— Loggins & Messina, Your Mama Don’t Dance (1972)
Despite the heading of the chart linked above, which claims to show inflation-adjusted crude prices, those are current dollar prices. Oil averaged around $3 a barrel in the 1950s and 1960s, in the silver certificate dollars of that time. Adjusted for inflation, those prices approached $30 a barrel in today’s devalued currency, as shown in this chart:
https://tinyurl.com/yxk9v77m
In today’s dollars, the 1979 oil shock pushed the oil price over $150 a barrel. Which raises a different question than posed above: with the real price of oil actually down over the past fifty years, why does Big Gov need to keep fighting a battle for fuel economy from two generations ago?
It’s been repurposed. To kill more efficiently by eliminating Carbon from the air. If plants die so does everything and everyone.
That is very true, but the world is currently consuming 105 million barrels per day. That is up from 93 mpd a decade ago and 54 mbpd in 1975.
Oil consumption is right in line with the increase in world population, although China and India are consuming many more times the oil they did 40 years ago.
Since oil consumption is right in line with carbon dioxide, I’m not too nervous about it …yet.