2)Our fuel is cleaner than theirs.  We may burn more, but because our standards for sulfur, mercury, and other pollutants in fuel is much stricter than theirs is, we actually emit less per pollution per vehicle, on average.

In China a 3000 lb car needs to get about 28 mpg. That doesn't seem all that ambitious to me. Of course, I don't know what test cycle they use for mileage rating.

The mission of automobile manufacturers is to maximize shareholder's wealth.  If enough American consumers wanted high mileage vehicles, and automobile manufacturers could sell them at a profit, the market would ensure a sufficient supply.  

The problem environmentalists face is not with the manufacturers.  It's with the consumers who are not yet convinced the harm they do outweighs the safety and comfort of larger vehicles.  If you guys were winning that battle, you wouldn't even need government regulation.

Consumers are not sheep.  They do make informed choices.  Why do you guys want to believe U.S. consumers are a bunch of helpless fools?

In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug. The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a "package deal," the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans' ingrained "stupidity" and willful blindness, unsalvageable.

Why do we remove mountain tops and destroy ecosystems to export coal? I thought that sort of thing only happened in poor third world countries!

If Berman is right the Chinese and Europeans will own those coal companies in a decade or two! Maybe we can sell them the aircraft carriers for scrap, too.

Apparently the coal is, not only going to Europe, but also to China, which must use up a lot of diesel fuel in those tankers, although some of the coal is for metallurgical work (coking coal), apparently it's high quality.  But it's scary that the demand for coal seems to be so high that even in the US, where coal costs are soaring, it's still being exported.  

There you have it -- the US used to import raw materials and export manufactured goods, now it's the opposite, just like those colonized Third World countries. hmmmm...

Hollywood, which until now has largely catered to American tastes, might begin more explicitly choosing scripts based on how they would play in rising economies like India and China. And while exports of manufactured goods might accelerate, the outsourcing trends that sent some American jobs abroad might reverse. Already, Germany-based BMW is expanding a South Carolina plant, betting that the weak dollar will make American workers cheaper than those in Germany or Japan.

I'm not surprised you might think this.  Whenever a Republican holds the presidency, the news media slants the news so much that the casual reader gets an incomplete picture.  Today, even the right-wing fools such as Lou Dobbs are distorting the real state of the U.S. economy.

Here's some real facts:

U.S. exports, 2006 ($ billions)

manufactured goods ....... $923 ... 63%
services ..................... $414 ... 29%
agriculture & commidities ..$43 .... 3%
fuel and other ...............$71 .... 5%

total U.S. exports ..... $1,437 .. 100%

That mix hasn't changed much in 2007, though full year data is not yet available.

U.S. exports comprised 11.1% of GDP in 2006.  Fifty years ago U.S. exports made up only 5.2% of GDP.

Export Fact Sheet

Facts about U.S. manufacturing

1. According to the WTO, 80% of trade among regions is in goods, 20% in services; that is, trade is usually in goods, as I explored in more detail here.

2. I, and others (particularly the late Seymour Melman) were very critical of Clinton's (and other Democrats') failure to deal with the trade deficit during the 90s.

3. While exports have been going up somewhat -- and considering the fall of the dollar, it's not much -- as you can see in the "GDP and Trade" tab of my on-line spreadsheet, imports are still at an unsustainable level.