Obama Scuttles NASCAR Over Emissions Concerns
Superstar Tony Stewart is driving away with the 2009 NASCAR season, having earned three victories and 18 top-ten finishes so far. But a presidential decree will prevent Stewart from raising the Sprint Cup trophy at season’s end.
Effective immediately, Pres. Barack Obama has issued an executive order banning all operations of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, citing environmental concerns. The ban will be lifted only when the sport’s governors establish “empathically rigorous” emissions standards for its stock cars.
In the president’s sights is NASCAR’s considerable carbon footprint. Currently, a single 500-mile race emits hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide, not including stadium operations or the transportation of fans in attendance.
Obama’s decision comes on the heels of a similar move by recalcitrant Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The Chávez administration has been pursuing a course of nationalization for years, spreading from oil to the coffee-roasting industry; now golf, too, has become a victim. Chávez intends to dismantle as many as ten golf of the country’s 28 courses for the construction of affordable housing, citing the sport’s inclusion of only the “bourgeois and petit-bourgeois.”
Given Chávez’s track record, this move has riled many but surprised few. Obama’s move, in contrast, is nearly unprecedented. One must peer into our country’s formative years to find an analogue.
“Back in the 1860s,” recalls Smithsonian historian Winston Becklidge, “President Lincoln ‘drafted’ the nation’s race horses as the country prepared for war and ran short on glue. This necessarily put equestrianism on an extended hiatus. But what Obama is proposing—to ban a sport for environmental reasons—is something I never thought I’d see.”
Predictably, this development has come as a sucker punch to a sport that has come to see itself as the favored son of the nation’s heartland.
NASCAR president Mike Helton was quick to cry foul on the basis of what he considers the president’s liberal bias. “This would never happen to football, basketball, or baseball,” he said. “Even when everyone in baseball was doing steroids, Washington let the league police itself. But now the rednecks are having too much fun, and Obama can’t take it.”
Additionally, Obama’s stock car stop will carry substantial economic consequences. NASCAR earned $3 billion in revenues in 2008, and brings millions more dollars into communities like Newton, Iowa—population 15,579—where nobody would ever go otherwise.
In defending his actions, Obama stressed the urgency of the fight against global warming, and noted the “self-sacrifice and civic responsibility that has long been our nation’s backbone.” In the future, he said, “if we succeed, the Sun and Corn Belts will continue to be home to the cleanest air in America.”
Despite NASCAR president Helton’s fears, Obama did not profess a desire to disband the association entirely. Said the president in reference to this past weekend’s race, “I cheered just as loudly for Tony Stewart at Watkins Glen as every other Tom, Dick and Mary racing fan out there.” Instead, Obama has formed a bipartisan task force comprised of House veterans to help NASCAR establish emissions regulations and find solutions. Obama has already raised the possibility of retiring the sport’s stock cars in favor of the more fuel-efficient Smart cars that have lately been trickling onto America’s streets.
“We wouldn’t even have to change the sport's acronym,” the president joked.
But ultimately, those with ties to the sport do not envision Obama’s change going over smoothly. Said NASCAR analyst Dan Downs, “Nobody wants to see a Smart car driving in circles—no matter how cute it is. Just as the president’s health care plan will subsidize the euthanasia of your and my grandparents, so this latest act will put down NASCAR.”