ASHINGTON, Dec. 12 — More than a dozen prominent business executives and retired military officers, including the chairman of FedEx and a former commandant of the Marine Corps, are lobbying Congress and the White House to undertake a comprehensive campaign to reduce reliance on imported oil.
The group, which includes top executives from the chemical, trucking and airline industries, wants much tougher fuel economy standards, not only on cars and sport utility vehicles, but also on heavy trucks, which some of the companies use. They want increased drilling offshore and within the United States, a much harder push for ethanol and other biofuels, and other changes that would permanently reduce the importance of oil as a strategic commodity and an economic force.
While the group, called the Energy Security Leadership Council, has embraced no startling new ideas, it hopes that evidence of broad support from business and military leaders will add the weight needed to get its proposals adopted.
Energy policy is in “almost perfect gridlock,” Frederick W. Smith, the founder and chief executive of FedEx, who is co-chairman of the group, said in a telephone interview. “It’s the height of folly for the U.S. to continue on this course, lest we have some major economic or national security problem. Something has to get done.”
Among the proposals is a 4 percent annual increase in fuel economy covering vehicles up to 10,000 pounds, substantially larger than those now covered by the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standard
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/business/worldbusiness/13energy.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
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