This comes a week after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed declaring greenhouse gasses a threat to public health – almost three years after California started acting on the issue. EPA officials in Washington D.C., had no public comment on California’s move.
Some South Coast business leaders have admitted they are concerned about how the state’s fuel standards may hurt commerce, but they are waiting for more explanation from Sacramento. The ARB is starting a marketing campaign to explain the new rules to small business.
In short, the California rules – which will be fully enforced by 2012 – require fuel providers, refiners, importers and blenders to make sure their products for the state’s market meet an average declining standard of “carbon intensity,” which is determined by the sum of greenhouse gas emissions associated with fuel production, transportation and consumption.
If that sounds complicated, it gets more involved when ARB officials describe how they plan to do this without further upsetting the state’s embattled economy.
However, when asked why this route is being taken in California’s quest to battle climate change, ARB officials are quick to respond that the new rules can do this by increasing the market for alternative-fuel vehicles and cutting 16 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 – which they claim will generate thousands of jobs along the way.
Why now, why this way?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger raised some eyebrows across the country in 2006 when he signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act, known as AB32, into law. His aides told him if carbon emissions weren’t reduced, the effects of climate change, especially global warming, would damage the state and world’s habitat and economy, which three years ago was not in a meltdown it is today.
A 2007 governor’s executive order called for the ARB to develop the fuel emissions standards approved April 23, said board spokesman Stanley Young. He said the fuel standards follow the state’s campaign to cut vehicle emission 30 percent by 2016. It’s the Golden State’s version of a full-court press to battle climate change.
The Princeton ‘wedges’
California officials were convinced something could be done about harmful gas emissions partly because of the research by two Princeton University professors who said in 2004 that reduction of global carbon-dioxide emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon per year in 2057 could be achieved. They said this could be done by an “aggressive, globally coordinated scale-up of a mix of already commercialized or nearly commercialized technologies.”
Professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow measured the emission cuts in “wedges.”
The professors have delivered a number of lectures around the country – including one Aug. 12 at UCSB – where they said “implementing eight wedges should enable the world to achieve the interim goal of emitting no more CO2 (or carbon dioxide) globally in 2057 than today, and in the following 50 years driving CO2 emissions to net-zero emissions would place humanity, approximately, on a path to stabilizing the climate at a concentration less than double the pre-industrial concentration.”
The professors said if fuels such as ethanol are used with a combination of solar, wind nuclear and other power sources, the goal of slashing greenhouse gases can be met.
That’s the theoretical side of the carbon-fuel emission issue.
The ethanol conundrum
On the more practical side, ARB officials say if ethanol producers can clean up their act in producing their fuel, the alternative to blowing carbon into the air will be using what spouts out of the ground.
Several measures were taken to ensure ethanol can help transportation fuel suppliers reach a proposed low-carbon fuel standard that the ARB passed April 23.
The ARB “believes that corn ethanol will play an important role in helping California achieve the goals of the (low-carbon fuel standard),” the ARB’s chairwoman, Mary Nichols, said in a letter to retired Gen. Wesley Clark, co-chairman of a biofuels association called Growth Energy.
The letter said steps California is taking are aimed at ease concerns that the state’s rules are biased against corn-based ethanol. That includes “investigating the land-use impact of all transportation fuels, harmonizing land-use emissions values with future U.S. and European Union standards, and listing biofuel feed stocks that have no or negligible land-use effects on carbon intensity by December.
ARB officials admit some ethanol producers have good reasons to be concerned.
“That’s because their production process, which involves burning coal, is too carbon intensive,” said Dimitri Stanich, ARB public information officer. “We hope they streamline their process to cut their carbon emissions.”
‘A multiplicity of fuels’
Stanich said the push is to bring “a multiplicity of alternative fuels to market in California.”
“It won’t happen overnight,” he said. “We want the market to dictate the economic process in bringing the need to bring more fuels to California.”
Eventually, the ARB sees an $11 billion reduction in the price of fuel. “Whether (fuel producers) want to pass that along to the consumers is their choice, but we think it is a wise business strategy,” Stanich said.
At least 20 ethanol producers plan to open operations in California soon, which would create 3,000 jobs in rural areas, Stanich said. However, he admitted several ethanol producers already operating in the state are having what he called “a difficult time” because the rising cost of corn. At the moment, corn is the primary source of ethanol.
Growing non-food crops
Stanich said use of other non-food crops to produce ethanol is growing.
Switch grass, for example, is being used as an ethanol source. Companies such as Ceres in Thousand Oaks are developing types of switch grass that can be used for this purpose. “Switchgrass is an invasive weed that can be found all over California,” Stanich said. “It looks very promising.”
“While the low-carbon fuel standard is designed to favor low-carbon, non-food energy crops like switchgrass, high-biomass sorghum and miscanthus (i.e. our crops), we are concerned about the precedents it may set and the uncertainty it may create as the advanced biofuel industry seeks the capital it needs to grow,” said Gary Koppenjan, Ceres corporate communications manager. “Going forward, policy makers, investors and the industry need to pursue regulations based on demonstrable data and studies, and rely less on computer simulations based on well-intended, but speculative assumptions.”
Attorney Jocelyn Thompson has dealt with the ARB for four decades. Now an attorney for Alston & Bird in Los Angeles, Thompson said she’s “very skeptical” of the way the state agency deals with cost estimates on its policies. “They often underestimate what it takes to get the job done. “I’m very skeptical about their cost equation.”
“This is the first regulation could have a widespread and costly impact on how fuels are made,” she said. “This totally overhauls our fuels and how we use them … whether it’s taking goods to market, driving to work or riding in the bus.”
She said her oil company clients have realized this has been coming for the past two years and have been “trying to find ways to comply with the rules.” She said, “They are trying to figure out how to run their businesses with them.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, as California moves forward on its own and about a dozen other states watch closely, the EPA’s action earlier this month sets the stage for a massive debate on climate change in Congress this summer.
The EPA health-hazard announcement covers six greenhouse gasses: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride.
After a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling called for the Bush administration to allow the EPA to do its job, the agency said April 17 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses from power plants, cars, and other sources can harm human health directly.
The agency also said global warming will have broader health effects on the population.