Automobiles

Rep. Ed Royce said the "only rational move" left for the administration is to approve the oil sands pipeline.

The chairman of a struggling electric car firm that got $529 million in Energy Department (DOE) loans resigned Wednesday.

Henrik Fisker, executive chairman and co-founder of Fisker Automotive, told The Detroit News in an email he would leave the firm because of “several major disagreements” regarding long-term strategy.

Fisker collected $193 million of its federal loan before DOE froze it last year after it fell behind on bringing its Karma vehicle to the United States market. In turn, the company put on hold a Wilmington, Del., plant that would have produced a different model. Vice President Biden attended the groundbreaking for that facility in 2009.

The firm also has endured several recalls and has not produced a car in six months. It's currently searching for a buyer — possibly in China.

That is sure to elicit jeers from Republicans, who have criticized many DOE clean-energy loan and grant programs.

An oil-and-gas lobby group is launching a TV advertising campaign aimed at convincing lawmakers to keep their hands off tax incentives awarded to the industry.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) announced Wednesday it would run the cable and broadcast spots inside the Beltway. It didn’t specify how much it was spending on the effort. (Watch the ads here and here.)

With the proposed Senate and House budgets released this week and President Obama’s coming next month, API Executive Vice President Marty Durbin said the industry must remind policymakers that “punitive tax schemes kill jobs and decrease revenues to the federal government over the long term.”

An oil-and-gas industry official on Friday urged Congress to repeal new renewable fuel standards (RFS) set forth by The Environmental Protection Agency, warning that the regulations could lead to a national gas supply problems and damage to millions of cars. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is warning that fatigued driving could be increased by daylight saving time.

Drivers who are already tired will lose an hour of potential sleep when clocks go forward next week, NTSB member Mark Rosekind said.

“Next week, America prepares to turn its clocks ahead and collectively as a nation we each lose an hour of sleep. In one night, this will generate a 300 million-hour national sleep debt and in the few days it takes our bodies to adjust, our nation will accumulate over a billion hours of lost sleep,” Rosekind wrote in a blog post on the NTSB website.“In transportation, this lost sleep kills, injures and costs billions of dollars." 

Your morning transportation speed-read:

HOUSTON — General Motors CEO Dan Akerson is calling on President Obama to create a new “blue ribbon” commission on energy policy to ensure the country derives a long-term advantage from its new-found abundance of oil and natural gas.

“I believe the president should immediately appoint a blue ribbon commission to develop a 30-year energy policy, a framework with checkpoints every five years to see how we are doing,” he said at a major energy conference here.

Akerson said the commission should include both energy producers, and consumers and have a “straightforward” charge: “Develop a plan to improve our standard of living by extending the duration of the natural gas and tight oil dividend for as long as possible.”

HOUSTON – BP is pressing ahead in the Gulf of Mexico despite the 2010 oil spill, the company's CEO said.

Your morning transportation speed-read: 

House Republicans said a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study made public Tuesday backs up claims that President Obama’s policies have handicapped oil-and-gas production on federal lands.

The study by the nonpartisan CRS concluded that while overall United States oil-and-gas production has increased since 2007, it has declined considerably on federal lands.

The findings play into GOP arguments that the domestic U.S. energy boom has occurred in spite of Obama. They have urged the White House to loosen restrictions on energy drilling in hopes of driving economic activity, generating federal revenues and creating jobs.