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A Detroit Bailout Must Include a Green Makeover
Jim Motavalli, Yale Environment 360
Any federal assistance package for U.S. automakers must require that they finally commit to retooling their industry to produce cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars.
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With much fanfare, the Clinton Administration in 1993 launched the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, challenging Detroit’s size-obsessed Big Three to come up with 80-mile-per-gallon vehicles. The $1.5 billion program ended in 2001 with success…of a sort. General Motors built a car called the Precept that reached the 80-mpg goal. Ford’s entry, the Prodigy, delivered 72 mpg, and Chrysler’s ESX-3 did the same. All three were handsome diesel-hybrid family sedans, and all three were one-of-a-kind prototypes. Yet with some additional development work, versions of them could have hit the market in time to give the Japanese hybrids – Toyota’s Prius and Honda’s Insight – some real competition.
Instead, Detroit’s automakers abandoned their hybrids and plowed their research and development money back into the trucks and SUVs that were making them steady profits. The first American hybrid,
… Detroit’s bigger-is-better formula was never sustainable in the long term, because it depended on a bottomless well of cheap oil. And when prices soared above $130 a barrel, the pain at the pumps turned consumers away from gas-guzzlers, perhaps permanently. Even as oil prices have dropped dramatically, SUV sales have made only very modest recoveries.
America’s auto industry is drifting toward unprecedented disaster, and its resistance to change is at the heart of the problem. Lawmakers rejecting a $25 billion industry bailout have been understandably skeptical that auto executives, many of whom had flown to the congressional hearings in private planes, had learned the proper lessons, not just about austerity but also about increasing consumer demand for fuel-efficient, low-emission vehicles.
Jim Motavalli is a senior writer at E/The Environmental Magazine, a blogger for the New York Times and The Daily Green, and a syndicated auto columnist. His six books include Forward Drive: The Race to Build Clean Cars for the Future
(24 November 2008)
A Green Deal for Transportation
Michael Renner, WorldWatch Institute
The more stringent fuel economy standards currently in place in Japan, Europe, and China suggest that Washington should adopt far more ambitious targets—at least 50 mpg by 2020, with continued improvements in later years.
In early 1942, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the entire U.S. auto industry to make a sudden and wholesale switch from producing cars to churning out tanks, armored cars, tank engines, and aircraft propellers. Close to 4 million vehicles had rolled off assembly lines the previous year, but emergency wartime priorities brought the nation’s auto production to zero for three years as the sale of private cars was banned. After World War II ended, the reconversion from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy was carried out with equal speed, accompanied by careful planning.
Today, facing an emergency of a different nature, it is imperative to consider a similar break with business-as-usual. Over the past half-century, automobile manufacturers in the United States and the rest of the world expanded production from 8 million vehicles in 1950 to some 74 million in 2007. The industry has grown to become a major driver of climate change. The U.S. “Big Three” manufacturers – GM, Ford, and Chrysler – have for two decades peddled oversized, gas-gulping SUVs that were good for short-term profits but lethal for the planet. This strategy has left Detroit with few options now that the financial crisis, rollercoaster oil prices, and unease about peak oil are weighing heavily on consumers’ minds.
Facing bankruptcy, the Big Three are now asking for a government bailout. Public and Congressional opinion has been skeptical, but Barack Obama may respond more favorably after he becomes president. The decision is not an easy one: an open-ended rescue rewards corporate failure, yet rejecting any sort of intervention risks massive job loss. Even so, there is a silver lining. Taking the 1940s experience to heart, this is a generational opportunity to revolutionize the industry – and more broadly, to reinvent transportation policy for sustainability. It is time for a strategic overhaul aimed at boosting vehicle fuel economy and reviving the long-neglected public transportation sector.
Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research organization. He is a co-author of the recent Worldwatch report Green Jobs: Working for People and the Environment.
(24 November 2008)
Related at Gristmill: Who’s to blame for the crisis in the auto industry?.
Is Obama’s Energy Plan Enough? No, Many Environmentalists Say
Bryan Walsh, TIME
With the possible exception of Barack Obama’s puppy-anticipating daughters, no one is more eagerly awaiting the incoming Administration than the leaders of the renewable-energy industries. President-elect Obama campaigned on the promise to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years to support alternative energy, like wind and solar, as well as the green jobs that the sector has the potential to create. At California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate summit on Nov. 18, Obama, in taped remarks, reaffirmed that he would hold fast to those campaign promises, starting with mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions. “This is a crucial step forward,” says Linda Church Ciocci, the executive director of the National Hydropower Association.
The problem is, it won’t be enough. As ambitious as Obama’s campaign promises were — at least compared to his predecessor’s — the future state of global energy will demand government policies with a much longer reach, according to alternative-energy leaders. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) annual World Energy Outlook, released Nov. 12, projects that global energy demand will increase by 45% between 2006 and 2030 — and that $26 trillion in power-supply investments will be necessary simply to meet those needs. Barring radical changes in our energy policy — beyond what Obama has pledged — greenhouse gas emissions will rise 45% by 2030, and extreme global warming would be virtually unavoidable.
(22 November 2008)
Obama’s green start
Geoffrey Lean, The Independent
Barack Obama and congressional leaders are preparing rapid legislation to cut US emissions that cause global warming and to kick-start a clean energy revolution.
Two bills are to be introduced as soon as the President-elect takes office in January. One will provide $15bn (£10.1bn) a year to encourage innovation in renewable energies as part of a thorough overhaul of the highly polluting US energy system. The other will pave the way to setting up a system of tradable emissions permits to combat global warming. The moves, to be taken quicker than expected, will galvanise top-level international negotiations on a new climate treaty that reopens in Poznan, Poland, next week, and will greatly boost attempts to bring in a “green new deal” as the best way out of the financial crisis.
Yesterday – as exclusively predicted in The Independent on Sunday three weeks ago – Mr Obama took the first steps towards creating green jobs, a crucial element of the proposed deal, as a top priority for his forthcoming administration. In his weekly radio address, he announced that he has ordered his advisers to produce an economic recovery plan that will create 2.5 million new jobs in two years by building windfarms, making solar panels and fuel-efficient cars, as well as in modernising schools and re-building crumbling infrastructure. ..
(23 November 2008)
