The hope behind the change

President Obama announced on Monday that he will direct the Department of Transportation to ratchet up MPG standards for the auto industry. Hailed as a clear victory for environmentalists by Time, "The more ambitious fuel economy standards, if adopted, will force the auto industry to rapidly retool to produce more efficient cars and trucks."

While this is clearly a defeat for Detroit, already on government life support as it is, this is far from a victory for environmentalists.

It actually represents a massive failure for the global warming green crowd.

-The price of a gallon of gas topped out over $4-$5 just last summer.
-Former Vice President Al Gore's propaganda/acting debut film An Inconvenient Truth was released almost 3 years ago.
-The Kyoto Treaty to combat global warming was introduced 11 years ago.
-Earth Day has been around for close to 40 years.

And yet, an amazing thing happened last month, according to CNN-

Trucks and SUVs will outsell cars in December, according to researchers at the automotive Website Edmunds.com, something that hasn't happened since February. Meanwhile, the forecast finds that sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to be way down.

Which means that though the far left global warming sky-is-falling crowd have convinced Congress that we need to all drive hybrids, they haven't convinced the American public.

In Minnesota, the Land of Lakes, we lead the country in boat ownership. While some cars can pull smaller boats, most speedboats, fishing boats and especially pontoons need a truck or SUV to pull them to the lake and back. President Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress just just increased the price of that truck or SUV by hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

In the end, common sense will prevail to make higher CAFE standards a failure. Making vehicles more fuel efficient makes them less expensive to operate. Less expensive to operate means you can drive farther for the same price. Driving farther means using as much gas as before. So higher standards will do nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

But in the short term, liberal Democrats may have just given conservatives in Minnesota a great issue for 2010. Wanna be able to afford to to your boat to the lake up north? Vote Republican.