NYT editorial: Now They Say They Can Do It

Detroit’s struggling automakers could do themselves and everyone else a favor by dropping their increasingly untenable four-year legal assault on California’s efforts to regulate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks.

Three different federal courts have ruled against them. While President Bush has been far too sympathetic to their cause — for either Detroit’s own good or the environment’s — the Obama administration surely will not share those sympathies.

Nor is there any technological impediment, despite what the automakers have long claimed. According to the business plans submitted to Congress by General Motors and Ford as part of their appeal for federal help (Chrysler has been far less forthcoming) both companies appear fully capable of meeting, if not exceeding, the California standards.

In 2002, California mandated new motor vehicle regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent by 2015. The law set no new fuel-economy standards, a federal responsibility. But a reduction in emissions of that magnitude would inevitably require big improvements in fuel efficiency in cars and light trucks, a category that includes sport-utility vehicles.

(More here.)