Politics & Power Quote by Sherwood Boehlert

It’s the bluntest kind of Washington realism: markets don’t sprint toward efficiency unless someone fires the starting gun. Boehlert’s line isn’t trying to romanticize regulation; it treats it as the only tool that reliably works at scale and on a deadline. The phrasing “swiftly” and “to the maximum extent practicable” is doing quiet political jujitsu, borrowing the language of statutes and rulemaking to pre-answer the usual objections. He’s signaling: yes, there are limits; no, we’re not fantasizing; we’re talking about enforceable standards calibrated to what industry can actually deliver.

The specific intent is persuasion through inevitability. By saying “the only way,” he collapses the menu of options - voluntary pledges, consumer choice, corporate goodwill - into a single credible mechanism: federal requirement. That move matters in the fuel economy and appliance-efficiency fights, where benefits are dispersed (lower bills, less pollution, less oil dependence) and costs are concentrated (retooling factories, redesigning products). In that political economy, “let the market decide” often means “let incumbents stall.”

Subtextually, he’s also defining efficiency as public policy, not personal virtue. You don’t need perfect consumers or enlightened CEOs; you need rules that reset the baseline. The context is a recurring American argument: we like the outcomes of regulation (cheaper energy, cleaner air) while resenting the act of being told. Boehlert, a politician speaking like a technocrat, stakes out a pragmatic middle ground - not anti-business, just unimpressed by business-as-usual.