As a little New Year's Eve present to the world, 11 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states banded together to start the process of developing a low-carbon fuel standard as part of their efforts to reduce the global warming pollution from their transportation sector. (Here are a few press releases and related stories.) This builds off of Massachusetts announcement earlier last year to launch this sort of effort. As the framework, signed by the head of each state's environmental agency, explains:
A "low carbon fuel standard" (LCFS) is a market-based, technologically neutral policy to address the carbon content of fuels by requiring reductions in the average lifecycle GHG emissions per unit of useful energy, which the State of California plans to implement for motor vehicles.
Four interesting things to note: first, the framework repeatedly makes reference to including both the direct and indirect emissions associated with biofuels. For instance there's this line:
The undersigned states believe it is critical to understand the true contribution of renewable fuels to reducing GHG emissions, and to calculate the carbon content of fuels on a full lifecycle basis, including direct emissions and significant indirect emissions, such as those from potential land use changes that may be attributable to fuel production.
Second, Pennsylvania signed on. PA is not one of states that adopted the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), One could argue that it's easy to sign up for a framework and other thing to implement the rules that are developed pursuant to that framework. I prefer to be optimistic and hope that PA is going to finally starting to get serious about addressing global warming.
Third, it appears that the states get the idea that a LCFS is a necessary but not sufficient step to address the GHG emissions from the transportation sector. They explicitly mention controlling emissions from vehicles (and many of these states have already adopted CA's vehicle CO2 standards -- the so called Pavley rules for the former CA legislator Fran Pavley that championed them) and reducing the vehicle miles traveled. There's also this line:
The states intend to be proactive in addressing biofuel sustainability issues within a LCFS, in order to prevent unintended consequences, maintain or increase carbon storage of lands and forests, and maintain and/or improve environmental quality.
I certainly hope that the states will build on this idea of proactive policies to develop a set of companion policies to go with their LCFS. These policies should jump start the best biofuels and require broad sustainability from biofuels and make electrification a real and near-term alternative to biofuels. The technology neutrality of a LCFS is only meaningful if there's more than one technology.
Fourth and finally, it's interesting to note that the letter states that an LCFS is "potentially applicable not only in transportation, but also for fuel used for heating buildings, for industrial processes, and for electricity generation." It will be interesting to see where this leads. Hopefully it's doesn't just turn into an incentive for fuel switching from oil to natural gas. While switching is good, it's not the shift away from fossil fuels that I think is a big part of the impetus behind the LCFS.
The states are relying on NESCAUM to do their analysis and help coordinate their efforts. This is good because, as I've written about before, NESCAUM has been working on this for a while. So they have more than a running start.
In closing the states note that they want to influence any federal debate and have a memorandum of understanding by the end of 2009. All I can add is right on! Let's hope that our New Year's Eve present in 2009 is the LCFS itself.
This post originally appeared on NRDC's blog.
This is huge for a number of reasons, most notably it is a state initiative undertaken in the absence of leadership from the Bush administration over the past eight years. Second, it provides a solid framework for the Obama administration to build on with a willing Congress (!!!) to take this standard national.
No wonder that now, all of a sudden, ExxonMobil sounds like they'd be agreeable to a carbon tax! Such an approach would keep the means of production in their hands -- the NESCAUM LCFS approach will require a specific set of fuel formulations that they would have to meet.
Big Oil will fight the LCFS tooth and nail, but now that the U.S. Supreme Court over a year ago made it clear that EPA and the states could impose and enforce CO2 emissions standards, the game is up. They will lose, and perhaps for the first time in 100 years, the grip of Big Oil on our economy and our fossil fuel dependence will weaken.
Can't come a moment too soon.
Stupidity like this, massive governmental intervention into the private sector, will only serve to further depress the economies in those states silly enough to actually implement such a policy.
The fact is that our governments, federal and state, have regulated motor fuels to one degee or another for decades in order to reduce their environmental impact.
Have fond memories of lead in gasoline, for example? Have you noticed there is no more lead in gasoline? Do you know why that's the case or why it was necessary to ban lead in gasoline over two decades ago, amid the bleating of Big Oil and people like you claiming it would destroy the economy, make gasoline too expensive, and put the automakers out of business?
There are a number of other examples of the need to regulate products like petroleum products, from where they come from, how finished fuels are refined, how they get to market, and finally, how and in what form they are used.
You have a problem with that?