UPDATE
Due to the poor rate of signatures on my previous petition, I've decided to introduce a new one with no compromises. It asks to repeal CAFE. While I lack confidence that this will be taken seriously by a government that has favored CAFE without some sort of concession, you are welcome to sign this petition as well.
New petition—repeal CAFE.
Old petition—repeal CAFE and replace it with something that governs the quality of emissions. Excessively bad emissions would be fined.
For the love of all things Camaro, do not argue about politics in this thread.
Nobody here likes CAFE. It puts the fear of a gas guzzler tax in us all. Imagine instead if GM could make the fuel burn cleaner and sell us whatever we want to buy. Instead of selling us mandated fuel economy, we could buy Camaros and Corvettes only being taxed if the vehicles are excessive polluters.
Let's go a little more in depth. Fuel burns in a chemical reaction. Sometimes, those chemicals are downright dangerous. Those chemicals come from all of our cars and go into the atmosphere. The thing about chemicals is that engineers and chemists know how to make enzymes that can help reduce the damage done by our cars. We can use these to obey national emissions standards if the manufacturers build them into the cars.
It is commonly known that 4-cylinder engines get better fuel economy. With my proposal, we won't have to worry about the death of the V8. As long as GM can make them burn fairly cleanly, which GM can do, then we can have V8s forever. It's good news for car enthusiasts.
It's also good news for environmentalists. Fuel economy is a nice feature to consider when buying a car, but it doesn't tell the whole story. A person who drives a Prius all over town is still emitting pollutants that could be mitigated to produce cleaner air. Just because you can go farther on a tank of gas doesn't mean your car is good for the environment. Burning cleaner makes cars safer for the environment.
What does burning cleaner mean? Burning petroleum products makes some really nasty chemicals that do serious damage. By reducing the number of chemicals that do not normally occur in nature, we will be releasing more chemicals that do occur naturally. These break down and do less harm to the environment. Think about it like smoking versus breathing. Smoking releases bad chemicals. Breathing releases natural chemicals. It's not that different.
I produced a petition for the White House and have 30 days to get 100,000 signatures.
Please sign my petition.