Fuel-efficiency initiatives gain speed

WASHINGTON – With voters clamoring for relief from sky-high gas prices and facing long waits to buy hybrid cars, bipartisan legislation to increase production of fuel-efficient vehicles and alternative fuels is gaining momentum.

More than a quarter of the Senate, including five potential presidential candidates, and 84 House members are pushing for a vote on “vehicle and fuel choice” measures that are supported by an unusual alliance of conservative and liberal groups.

Senate sponsors, including Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., vow to force a vote on their plan, preferably as part of a vote on a broader energy bill that may deal with gasoline price gouging. Altogether, 28 senators support the bill.

House sponsors – Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, a GOP junior leader, and New York Rep. Eliot Engel, a veteran Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee – hope to do the same on a companion bill should House GOP leaders also try to move emergency energy legislation this month. They are willing to consider a compromise to overcome objections of automakers and oil companies.

“The ball is in the Republicans’ court,” Engel said. “They have the power to move this bill. It is bipartisan and it is not a bill looking for political advantage of one party over the other. This is precisely the kind of thing that the American people want to see.”

The alternative fuel and vehicle bills would do little to immediately reduce gas prices that averaged $2.94 a gallon for regular gasoline across the nation last week. Instead, they set goals for reducing U.S. consumption of foreign oil by half by 2025. Any long-term reduction in the skyrocketing demand for oil globally could ease pressure on prices.

The House bill requires that 80 percent of cars manufactured in 2012 be flexible-fuel vehicles. The Senate version would require only 10 percent in the same year but bumps it up to 50 percent in 2016.

Energy experts say there is considerable pressure on Congress to pass some kind of energy legislation before the November election. The key question is whether Congress has enough time before its August recess to bring it up and then deal with amendments on the Senate floor. But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., is pushing ahead, asking committee chairmen to move recommendations from the GOP’s “energy working group” by mid-July.

Kingston, vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, said the fuel choices bills are running into roadblocks even as they continue to attract co-sponsors.

The Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler – announced in late June plans to double their production of flex-fuel vehicles that can use E-85 ethanol or biodiesel by 2010. That would mean that 20 percent of cars built by them that year would be capable of running on alternative fuels.

To do more in a short period of time as required by the fuel choices bills, could prevent domestic automakers from picking the right technology for alternative fuel cars, GM officials said.

“We cannot support mandates that are not founded on sound science because they can have a catastrophic economic effect on industry,” said Greg Martin, director of policy and communications in GM’s Washington, D.C., office.

But Kingston and others want a faster pace.

American automakers “are going 30 miles an hour whereas we want them to go 60 miles an hour, and Toyota and Honda are already going 50 or 60 miles per hour,” Kingston said.