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Obama’s Big Step in Right Direction on Auto Fuel Efficiency and Emissions
Viscounti, All That Natters
The Rose Garden announcement made today by President Barack Obama is perhaps the first tangible example of the political and public policy synergy among environmentalists, national security interests, big business and consumers.
The president’s “National Fuel Efficiency Policy” will serve consumers with more fuel efficient cars – cheaper to drive – big business by streamlined and equal application of federal regulation, and the nation’s national security interests by decreasing our dependence on foreign oil. Finally, less gasoline burned means less pollutants into the atmosphere, a policy environmentalists should heartily support.
According to information released by the White House, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the federal Dept. of Transportation and the state of California all collaborated with auto industry and environmental interests on the new fuel efficiency policy.
Among other things the new program will:
- Require that all sizes of cars and trucks become more energy efficient;
- Requires automakers to maintain an average fuel economy rating for their fleets of 35.5 mpg by 2016;
- Create a uniform national policy cutting compliance costs for automakers;
- Projects a reduction in oil consumption of 1.8 billion barrels over model years 2012-16;
- Projects a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 900 million metric tons over the same period.
(19 May 2009)
Obama auto efficiency move a blow to U.S. refiners
Timothy Gardner and Richard Valdmanis, Reuters
The Obama administration’s ambitious plan to raise auto efficiency standards would cut deeply into notoriously voracious U.S. gasoline demand, dealing another blow to a refining sector hard hit by recession and bracing for looming climate regulation.
The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama will announce the most aggressive proposal for increasing auto fuel economy standards ever, requiring an average efficiency of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.
The measure would cut some 1.8 billion barrels of oil consumption by 2016, the White House said, representing a big drop in the gasoline demand outlook that could hit refiner profitability and force companies to review costly plans to increase production capacity.
(19 May 2009)
Getting Out From Behind the Wheel
Tom Zeller Jr., Green Inc., New York Times
… with the imperative of global warming and the vagaries of fossil-fuel dependence now, perhaps more than ever, embedded in the popular discourse, the axiomatic relationship between Americans and their cars seems ripe for re-examination.
The topic was broached last week as part of Elisabeth Rosenthal’s report for the International Herald Tribune on a “car free” German community.
Vauban, a suburb of Freiburg, is purpose-built to discourage passenger car traffic — which, she reported, accounts for some 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, and as much as 50 percent in some car-intensive areas of the United States.
Homeowners in Vauban can still own cars, but parking for any length of time is verboten, and relegated to one of two large garages at the edges of the development.
The result is a lot of walking and biking to shops and banks and other everyday destinations, which are distributed far more liberally within the community than a typical American development. And where longer excursions are called for, many residents take to car-sharing.
The upshot: Seventy percent of Vauban’s residents have no car.
… In a recent e-mail message, Daniel Lerch, the program director at the Post Carbon Institute, a California-based research organization focusing on fossil fuel depletion and climate change, told me he thought “a larger trend away from absolute car-centrism (in both city planning and individuals’ preferences) is quite evident and has been under way for some time” in the United States.
He pointed, for example, to the rise of New Urbanism — a school of urban design arising in the 1980s and grounded in the idea that communities ought to be oriented around accessibility, public spaces and, well, walking as a viable option for getting things done on a day-to-day basis.
The growth of car-sharing services like ZipCar, urban farmers’ markets, and “the well-established and growing image of the American suburb as a dissatisfying, unhealthy, and even expensive life for more and more people,” Mr. Lerch suggested, are evidence of “a continuing and growing trend away from absolute car-centrism.”
And yet, echoing Mr. Poole’s lament from the exurbs of St. Louis, Mr. Lerch said that for all of this, an American Vaubanism was unlikely to be in the cards anytime soon.
“The barriers to less car-centric living and urban development in this country are very formidable and still pretty institutionalized,” he said. “I’m not holding my breath.”
(17 May 2009)
Bicycles touted as ‘first modern post-fossil vehicle’
EurActiv
Cycling is not only good for the health, but can also help tackle global challenges like climate change and oil dependency, specialists argued at the world ‘Velo-City’ conference in Brussels this week.
Jörg Schindler, a campaigner at the Energywatch Group, an NGO, said “oil will be less available and more expensive in the coming years,” as proven reserves dry up and fewer new fields are discovered or exploited.
“Transport relies to well over 90 percent on oil, be it transport on roads, by ship or by aircraft,” according to NGO’s oil reportPdf external .
“Peak oil is now,” Schindler warned, saying that he expected electric-powered bikes to turn bicycles into “the first modern post-fossil vehicle”.
… [Philip Darmon, chairman of Cycling England, a UK Department of Transport initiative said:] “There is growing recognition that cycling contributes to tackling obesity, traffic congestion, climate change or even improving quality of life,” said Darmon, “but the potential role played by the bicycle for economic development is mainly ignored by decision-makers”.
Darmon further stressed the health benefits of cycling: “It reduces the risk of dying prematurely from heart disease, of developing diabetes, of developing high blood pressure or colon and breast cancer, but also helps controlling weight and reduces feelings of depression and anxiety.”
(15 May 2009)
