Traffic deaths in the United States rose 10.4 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2015, maintaining a steady climb ... to 17,775 in the first six months of 2016 from 16,100 in the same period in 2015

The New York Times had an article stating that vehicular deaths jumped 10% in the first half of 2016. The Times was very careful , however, not to speculate on the cause.

The dire statistics were the latest bad news from the traffic safety administration. Beginning in the final months of 2014, the rate of fatalities has increased for seven consecutive quarters compared with the corresponding quarters of previous years. Officials have not identified a specific cause for the most recent increase. "It is too soon to attribute contributing factors or potential implications of any changes in deaths on our roadways," the agency said.

No, it isn't. It's called CAFE standards. Automakers are under obligations to make cars more and more fuel-efficient. It sounds great, doesn't it? Everyone wants his car to be more fuel-efficient – until he realizes that fuel-efficiency is achieved not with some kind of engine out of Star Trek, but simply by making cars lighter and lighter. Every year there are tighter and tighter targets, and cars have to become lighter and lighter.

When you are in a car crash, the less your car weighs, the less protection you have and the more likely you are to be injured or killed. Obama bullied car companies into agreeing to make cars less and less safe. Why?

Partially out of the erroneous fear that gasoline is a non-renewable resource, and we will run out of it. We actually have enough proven reserves of gasoline for several hundred more years, longer than we have been using gasoline as a source of fuel.

The other reason for fuel efficiency mandates is fear of imaginary global warming. The high priests of the imaginary global warming religion fear that car exhaust causes global warming. Even though it hasn't been getting warmer in recent years. Even though most carbon dioxide emissions are produced naturally, not by cars or manufacturing.

But facts never get in the way of ideology, and so cars have been made less and less safe. That's why more and more people are dying: to satisfy the misplaced guilty instincts of the environmental extremists who rule this country.

Obama reminds me of the evil high priest in Conan the Barbarian, played by James Earl Jones, who sacrificed victims to his god at the top of his pyramid. The only difference is that Obama doesn't have a pyramid.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.