Publication Name
Time
Author(s)
Joseph Szczesny
Automakers will have to design lighter- weight vehicles, hybrid electric cars and clean diesel engines, as well as learn to use biofuels, to be able to meet the new fuel-economy standards just set by Congress. Once President Bush signs the legislation, those standards will climb 30% to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. But while the auto industry has reluctantly accepted the new federal regulations, it is still balking at even more stringent rules that are being set in a growing number of states.
California and 20 other states have enacted laws calling for limits on greenhouse gas. California's greenhouse law alone calls for a 43-miles-per-gallon fuel-economy standard, which will require even more drastic change in the vehicles Americans drive. The automakers, including Detroit's Big Three, Asian giants such as Toyota and Honda and European carmakers, have been fighting a legal battle against such rules. But so far, the automakers have lost a string of engagements in court. Last week a U.S. District Judge in Fresno, Calif., ruled in a pivotal four-year-old lawsuit that California has the right to set its own standards on greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. "Both EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency] and California... are equally empowered through the Clean Air Act to promulgate regulations that limit the emissions of greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, from motor vehicles," the judge ruled. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents U.S., Japanese and German carmakers, is expected to appeal the California ruling, but the precedents are piling up against it. Even the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states can ask the EPA to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases.
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For environmentalists, meanwhile, the new standards represent a huge victory. "Americans demanded action on energy security and global warming and Congress responded," says Phyllis Cuttino, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts Campaign for Fuel Efficiency. The new federal standards, she says, "shows how powerful these issues have become — and they're not going away." Says Cuttino: "Just two years ago, 62 members of the Senate opposed any increase in fuel efficiency. Just six months ago, the auto industry was saying 35 miles per gallon was 'unachievable.' Today, in a triumph of policy, process and politics, an energy bill has passed the House that will save 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, $25 billion for consumers annually at the pump in 2020." And she congratulated the automakers. "It makes the... industry the first major sector of the American economy that will reduce its global warming pollution — by the equivalent of taking 28 million cars off the road." Detroit and Co. probably wish the states were as sympathetic.
Read the full article Can Detroit Live With New Fuel Rules? on the Time website.
