The bright and fiesty Glenn Kinen responds to my earlier quip that TNR’s Peter Beinart may have overstated his case a bit when he called for stricter U.S. gas mileage regulations as one half of his two-pronged strategy (he also advocates helping the Russians shore up their nuclear material) to defeat the “axis of Evil.”

Hey, Glenn–

Still in the middle of grading papers, but I promise I’ll post a response to your criticisms sometime soon. The gist will be that past mileage-increase regulations haven’t diminished oil use (people who get better mileage and pay less for gas just tend to drive more), that oil is indeed a fungible commodity (as more than just the Cato folks will argue), and that — rather than give up my SUV (I live in Colorado after all, where its snowy and mountainous and expansive, while Beinart, et al., probably live in Manhattan — and you in Boston– where everyone’s packed together and public transportation is feasible), I’d just as soon take the money it would cost to institute additional regulations and upgrade auto plants, etc., and spend it on an Alternative Energy Manhattan Project (how appropriate the name here!).

Besides, the U.S. uses its oil quite productively per capita (according to figures I’ve seen from the, uh, Cato institute, I think it was…), and — because cars aren’t something you buy every year — the net effect of the regulations themselves wouldn’t show up for a decade or so (until the end of the next buying cylcle) by which time we’ll likely have found a cheap way to use fuel cells.

It’s not that I think better gas mileage is a bad idea per se; that would be a silly and blindly ideological position to take. No, it’s that I have a problem with people who hitch the terrorism wagon to their own pet causes, like the need to increase the gas mileage of SUVs, or the desire to keep kids off of drugs, for instance. I (like you) was critical of those ridiculous drug PSAs aired during the SuperBowl that sought to equate drug use with aiding terrorism. I’m just being consistent.

Besides — shouldn’t the important variable in my equation be the amount of driving I do, and not gas mileage itself? If I drive half as much as a person who gets a third more gas mileage out of his Honda than I do out of my Jeep, aren’t I the one foiling the bad guys and so making the world safe for democracy…?

Regards–

Jeff

PS. How ’bout I just use this as my response?

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