I’M AGAINST RAISING THE CAFE STANDARDS, but here’s a roundup of ways automakers can meet them. Still here’s the key bit: “There’s no question that Detroit can build cars and trucks that meet the new CAFÉ standard. And Congress is determined to make them do it. But has anybody calculated the costs? Raising fleet standards to these levels would add thousands of dollars to the cost of the average vehicle—carbon fiber and polycarbonate don’t come cheap, folks! . . . We suspect that consumers—and voters—may experience something like sticker shock when they realize they’re the ones paying the bill.”

A gas tax would be more honest — which is probably why Congress is considering raising CAFE standards instead. Roundup on the energy bill here. Happily it seems that subsidies for ethanol didn’t do as well as expected. No word on what Ted Kennedy said about wind power, though there was a big debate over requiring utilities to generate more power from renewables; that failed too.