While I was away

While I was away this past week, NHTSA publically proposed the much awaited changes to the light-truck CAFE standards. See GreenCarCongress for a first look. My expectation that the standards will crawl up to 23.4 mpg by 2010 seems to be quite correct (23.5 is the actual proposal). There are more interesting bits in the rulemaking (Hint: See page 150 and think California). I will make a detailed post about the proposed changes later this week. For a couple of different interesting (but not new) takes on the proposal, see here and here.
Meanwhile, Oil markets continue to be volatile and October crude futures are expected to flirt with $70 mark in the early part of the week.