When a private club that is too cozy with corporations make the rules on consumer protection, guess what happens? The National Conference on Weights and Measures met last week and did exactly what the fuel business–from Exxon to the corner gas station–wanted. It voted to just get rid of proposals and plans to fix the "hot fuel" ripoff, in an action that reminded me of the old Soviet trick of removing purged bureaucrats from ceremonial photos.
Because a private and lobbyist-influenced group makes the rules, you
won’t know this summer whether the gasoline you buy is 60 degrees (in
which case you lose nothing) or 90 degrees (you lose about 8 cents
worth per gallon), and no gas station will have pumps that fix the ripoff. The gas station keeps the extra, some of which
trickles up to the wholesalers and the coffers of Exxon and friends.
The NCWM–composed mostly of state weights and measures officials–voted to expunge years of work on proposed standards and recommended technology for gas pumps that would compensate for the expansion of gasoline at high temperatures. Such pumps would add a little extra fuel to each "gallon" to compensate for heat expansion, saving motorists in warm regions a few to several cents a gallon on each purchase. But the voting members simply dumped all of thse technical standards under pressure from "associate members"–lobbying organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute, for the very businesses that would be regulated. If the NCWM wants to take up the issue again it has to start from square one, with a proposal by a member and a vote to proceed.
There’s still hope in an agreement by the Costco chain to install temperature-adjusting pumps at its stores in warm states, to settle its piece of a national hot fuel lawsuit. California actually has a set of pump standards ready for Costco to use, even
though industry pressure has stalled the pumps’ sale in the state for more than three years. And in
that time, the three chief state regulators with the most experience on the hot fuel issue have either
retired or been promoted out of reach. Otherwise, as they say, the state’s hot fuel standards are shovel-ready.
Arizona already accepts any pump certified by California, so as with clean cars, California could be the national pioneer and the leader.
But national regulation is simply broken. The NCWM works pretty well for things like controlling the amount of injected water in a turkey and making sure commercial scales are accurate. But it wilts under political heat–the kind that major oil lobbies can generate. Here are a few reasons:
- The industries regulated by NCWM decisions, from food production to fuel, are a revolving-door employer of former and retired state weights and measures officials.
- The lobbyists–who are officially "associate members"–attend every regional and national weights and measures meeting that might affect their industry. They bring position papers, they schmooze, they buy drinks, and they put pressure on elected officials in the home states. The weights and measures officials rarely hear any other voices at the meetings, mostly in obscure locations like a mountaintop in Utah or a resort in Alaska.
- The industry associate members pay substantial membership dues, and are free-handed with money on top of that–for hospitality suites at meetings, for member outings to sightsee and dine, even to make up an operating shortfall during hard fiscal times.
On top of all that, you have to be a paying member to find out what the National Conference on Weights and Measures, or its four regional organizations, is doing in real time. The group considers itself transparent, but it’s not governed by any open-meeting laws. Its meetings certainly aren’t streamed online–unlike federal government rule-making meetings. Published accounts of meetings–which come much later–are primarlly skeleton records of what was discussed or passed and what wasn’t. Even the group’s newsletter and electronic message board require membership.
Even if we acknowledge that government did a terrible job regulating banks and slaughterhouses over the last decade, the private model is no way for the U.S. to make the rules that govern so much of the fairness in our marketplaces. It’s like putting auto safety standards in the hands of Toyota.