In the summer of 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff invited a group of environmentalists over to the Old Executive Office Building to talk about building more fuel-efficient automobiles.
Frank told them small cars aren’t the problem. The problem is SUVs plowing into small cars. “If you allow half the population–and usually it’s the wealthier half–to have big vehicles,” he said, “then you allow more big vehicles on the road, and it’s less safe for small cars.”
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Frank is even more cynical. A few weeks after the meeting he got a call from a staffer at the Council on Environmental Quality thanking him for his testimony. “I still have the voice mail,” he says, sitting in his office near the corner of Western and Peterson surrounded by blown-up photos of camping trips to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Alaska, and Argentina. He punches a few buttons on his phone and out comes the voice of John L. Howard Jr., an aide to Connaughton.
Frank pulls a face.
“If I’d have known then what I know now I probably would have gone to law school and become an environmental lawyer,” he says. “But that field was just getting started back then, in 1974, so I kind of viewed my options as going into forestry. I don’t know anything about agriculture or trees or botany. I just didn’t see myself as a forest ranger.”
As a salesman, he knew what turned on car buyers, and he persuaded the group to change the way it promoted fuel-efficient cars. It had been trying to guilt-trip consumers into driving small cars by pointing out the environmental benefits. Now its Web site features articles titled “Clean Energy Policies Would Create 1.4 Million New Jobs” and “High Gas Prices Not a Problem for This Toyota Prius Owner.”
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers–a Washington lobby group representing General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and six foreign automakers–opposes any increase in mileage standards. And it sees Frank as a heretic on a misbegotten crusade. “He’s alone on that,” says communications director Eron Shosteck. “The fundamental problem with fuel-efficiency regulations is that they don’t take into account market dynamics.”
