SolveClimate is looking for writers, please click here to learn more.
Another Dingell Smokescreen for the Auto Industry?
by David Sassoon - Sep 5th, 2007
Times columnist David Leonhardt went to see Dingell in action at a town hall meeting in Ann Arbor, but the old political codger, it seems, might have gotten the best of the columnist, even though Leonhardt went with his eyes open.
It’s fair to say that during Mr. Dingell’s 52 years in the House of
Representatives, he has often been the congressman representing the
American automobile industry. He helped win a bailout for Chrysler in
1979, and he has fought nearly every regulation you can imagine, be it
on air bags, tailpipe emissions or gas mileage. Back in the 1980s, when
a senator from Nevada tried to raise fuel economy standards, Mr.
Dingell responded by introducing a bill to create a giant new nuclear
waste dump in Nevada.
Now Dingell is set to float a carbon tax in Congress because, as he admitted -- “just to sort of see how people really feel about this” and because he doubted that “the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them.”
It's another ploy, like the waste dump in Nevada, to put pressure on his elected colleagues to back off Detroit. If he was serious about solving climate, he'd stop protecting the auto industry. And then he'd be in a really strong position to extract all the other needed solutions -- from every other campaign-contributing special interest that his congressional colleagues are themsleves protecting.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Post new comment