Fuel-Efficiency Standards Mitigate Oil Shock

Your current federal government is making your trip to the grocery store and all the groceries hauled by truck to that store cost more by waging an aimless war that has shut down shipping in the Persian Gulf and raised fuel prices. The only reason this military folly hasn’t hurt the economy more severely is that past, rational federal governments made our cars use less gas:

According to the Energy Information Administration, gasoline consumption fell about 1% last year, compared to 2024. It was down 4% compared to the pre-pandemic high in 2019. And that’s even as we keep driving more: “Vehicle miles traveled” is the government’s measure of our driving habits, and it rose over 1% last year.

It’s a continuation of a decades-long trend of slowly rising fuel efficiency.

One thing that made the oil shocks of the 1970s especially bad: cars back then weren’t very fuel efficient.

“When I was young, a car got 13 miles per gallon, you know? Now they’re getting 30 miles, and some of them are up 50, 60 miles per gallon,” said Daniel Sperling, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis.

That’s largely thanks to federal regulations that were created in response to those oil crises, he said.

“So the industry has been obligated to continually supply more efficient vehicles,” Sperling said [Henry Epp, “The Oil Shock Could Be Worse If It Wasn’t for U.S. Fuel Efficiency Standards,” Marketplace, 2026.04.13].

Trump created this muted oil shock after stripping away fuel-efficiency standards and other policies meant to protect us from oil shocks:

The Trump administration has rolled back a whole suite of policies that were designed to promote EVs, including state-level mandates, federal regulations and consumer-facing tax credits. As a share of new car sales, EVs have dropped from roughly 10% in 2024 to under 6% last month.

Meanwhile, the administration has also rolled back fuel economy standards for gasoline-powered vehicles, and eliminated penalties for automakers that don’t comply with them, which allows them to make as many gas-guzzling large SUVs and trucks as they can sell.

Instead of efficiency, the administration emphasizes higher oil production as a buffer against supply shocks. In a statement emailed to NPR, a White House spokesperson wrote that “President Trump’s energy dominance agenda is focused on unleashing reliable, affordable, and secure energy sources so that we do not have to rely on a chokehold like the Strait of Hormuz for our oil and gas supply.”

The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of oil, which does protect the country from experiencing outright shortages, but does not insulate consumers from higher global prices [Michael Copley and Camila Domonoske, “War Is Pushing Up Energy Prices Now. Trump’s Policies Could Hurt for Years to Come,” NPR: Morning Edition, 2026.03.23].

Such are the results of electing a maniac who willfully ignores history:

After the last 1973 embargo, the U.S. learned a valuable lesson about dependence on fossil fuels. The repeal of efficiency standards seems to indicate that Trump is bent on unlearning that lesson, said Christof Rühl, an energy economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

“Their policies are designed to slow down improvements,” he said. “Efficiency improvements will slow down, inevitably” [Jake Bittle, “As Gas Prices Soar, Trump Is Ignoring the Lessons of the Last Oil Crisis,” Grist, 2026.03.10].

The only people benefiting from this reckless war and the dismantling of fuel efficiency are the fossil-fuel barons who fill Trump’s campaign coffers. The rest of us should use the midterm elections this fall to elect Democrats to take Trump’s foot off the gas and restore rational energy policy that protects our pocketbooks.