In 2006, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration—which, with the Environmental Protection Agency, shares responsibility for the cafe standards—changed the way it did its calculations. Instead of having to meet a fleetwide average, car manufacturers would now have to meet different standards, depending on how many vehicles they sold of what size. “It is the most complicated system they could possibly come up with,” Dan Becker, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign, said.

This new “footprint” method had the perverse effect of further incentivizing carmakers to produce gas guzzlers. Because of the way the more complicated system accounted for car size, the more big-footprint cars a company sold, the lower the over-all efficiency standard it had to meet. A paper that a pair of researchers at the University of Michigan published, in 2011, predicted that the new accounting method would have the same effect as “adding 3–10 coal-fired power plants to the electricity grid each year.” In 2015, S.U.V. sales topped sedan sales for the first time in the U.S., and by last year S.U.V.s, vans, and pickups were together https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report"}" href="https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-uri="4d9588e6acad0610e104b27bf230403d" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;cursor:pointer;--color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);transition:color 200ms ease 0s;line-height:inherit">outselling sedans by a ratio of more than two to one. Even so, most car manufacturers couldn’t meet the cafe standards set for them. In 2021, Ford, Toyota, G.M., Kia, BMW, Volkswagen, Nissan, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler, all came in “above standard.” (Only Tesla, Subaru, and Honda came in below.) According to calculations by Chris Harto, the senior energy-policy analyst for Consumer Reports, roughly half of the gains in fuel economy in the U.S. between 2010 and 2020 were eaten up by the shift to larger vehicles.

Meanwhile, drivers in other countries were also turning to sport-utility vehicles. In 2010, S.U.V.s made up less than seventeen per cent of new-car registrations around the world; by last year, that figure had grown to forty-six per cent. The International Energy Agency recently reported that, if “SUVs were an individual country, they would rank sixth in the world for absolute emissions in 2021, emitting over 900 million tonnes of CO2.” The agency urged governments to focus on policies that would reduce S.U.V. sales: “Some governments have already started introducing relevant measures, such as France and Germany, which have put a tax on large and high-emissions cars.”

As it happens, the Biden Administration is set to unveil a new set of cafe standards on Friday. These standards are supposed to replace ones that the Obama Administration negotiated with the car industry in 2012, and which the Trump Administration scrapped in 2020. They will be better than the ones in place now, but not nearly as good as they could have been—or as they need to be to meet the I.E.A.’s guidance. Among other things, they leave the S.U.V. loophole in place.

The last time https://fortune.com/2022/03/10/gas-prices-record-high-inflation-wage-growth-oil/"}" href="https://fortune.com/2022/03/10/gas-prices-record-high-inflation-wage-growth-oil/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-uri="a0ec276a2c672e9ffae2a3a9ce96dcd2" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;cursor:pointer;--color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);transition:color 200ms ease 0s;line-height:inherit">gas prices were as high as they are now was in 2008. (Though, in inflation-adjusted terms, prices were higher fourteen years ago.) What would have happened if smarter vehicle-efficiency standards had been put in place back then? It’s impossible to know exactly, but, in the intervening years, the U.S. certainly could have cut oil consumption by a million barrels a day—the amount that the Biden Administration has said it will release from the strategic reserve. (Total U.S. oil consumption is almost twenty million barrels a day.) Unfortunately, as https://slate.com/business/2022/03/high-gas-prices-biden-russia-ukraine-cafe-standards-obama.html"}" href="https://slate.com/business/2022/03/high-gas-prices-biden-russia-ukraine-cafe-standards-obama.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank" data-uri="d2f6eba3a2402650bd2576636b9c526d" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;cursor:pointer;--color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);transition:color 200ms ease 0s;line-height:inherit">Slate noted recently, “when it comes to oil shocks, we have the memory of goldfish.”