Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We need a number of solutions - we need more efficiency and conservation. Efficiency is a big one. I think car companies need to do a lot better in producing more efficient cars. They have the technology, we just need to demand them as consumers.
Our goal was to completely change transportation. Change traffic. And make it possible to get anywhere you want to go without owning a car.
Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
Let's give people more incentives to get fuel efficient vehicles.
Efficiency innovations arise in industries that already exist. They provide existing goods and services at much lower costs. They are not empowering. Efficiency innovators become the low cost providers within an existing framework.
Obviously, the highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.
Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.
Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource.
So the only way we're going to improve fuel economy or appliance efficiency swiftly and to the maximum extent practicable is if the government requires it.
How we get power, how cars are powered, when the technology and resources to have something that is infinitely better, we still use old-school technology. We're still using that same exact structure.