May 20, 2009
Editorial
The Earth Wins One
The nationwide automobile mileage and emissions standards announced by President Obama on Tuesday represent a huge step forward in the effort to limit greenhouse gases and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. They also represent a departure from the Bush administration’s indifference on these issues and an important down payment on Mr. Obama’s pledge to fashion an aggressive and imaginative energy policy.
The standards, forged after weeks of negotiations orchestrated by Carol Browner, the White House coordinator on energy and environmental matters, may also mark the end of decades of wearying, unproductive legal and political combat between the automobile industry and environmentalists.
Sharing the occasion with Mr. Obama were automobile executives and activists. Also in attendance were two governors on different sides of the issue — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, whose state had been fighting to impose its own, much stricter emissions standards on cars and trucks, and Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, who had worried that tough standards could kill an industry already on life support.
The agreement will raise fuel-efficiency standards to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016 — a 40 percent increase over today’s 25 m.p.g. standard and a 30 percent increase over today’s actual fleetwide mileage of almost 28 m.p.g. And for the first time, it will impose limits on tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks. The goal, roughly speaking, is to reduce greenhouse emissions from new cars and trucks by nearly one-third by 2016. Happily for Mr. Schwarzenegger, this will achieve, on a national basis, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles called for in California’s landmark clean car program. California had repeatedly asked the Bush administration for the federal waiver it needed (and had never before been denied) to enforce its own rules, only to be rebuffed.
Odd as it may seem, California’s triumph may also end up being a boon to the beleaguered automakers.
To survive, Detroit is clearly going to have to make more fuel-efficient cars. And since Mr. Obama would surely have granted California the waiver it needed, Detroit would have been confronted with two sets of emissions standards: tough ones in California and the states that opted into California’s program; easier standards elsewhere. The new rule provides a single national efficiency standard as well as the regulatory certainty that the automakers need to plan their production schedules.
With this deal, America also wins back a bit of energy independence. But the biggest winner could be the atmosphere. Vehicles account for more than one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in this country.
The new standards are not a substitute for the kind of comprehensive economywide emissions cap now under consideration in the House. They are, though, an important and necessary start.
