Yes, there is sometimes good environmental news. On July 29th, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, President Obama announced an ambitious increase in fuel-economy standards for passenger vehicles for model years 2017 to 2025, capping weeks of talks between the White House, the state of California, automakers and environmentalists. The landmark deal calls for cars and light trucks to achieve a fleet-wide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, only slightly less than the 56.2 miles per gallon that the administration mulled during the talks. While the standard might have been higher, it requires a significant improvement from the 2011 standard of 27 miles per gallon. Americans are not going to stop driving, and gasoline engines are going to continue to drive many cars, so increasing efficiency is a positive step. One that will ripple through other countries as well as the U.S. Perhaps it’s ironic that this deal got done while the US Congress was proving itself incapable of doing any heavy lifting on anything at all.