California adopts first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from fuel

California took aim today at the oil industry and its effect on global warming, adopting the world’s first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.

The state Air Resources Board voted 9-1 in favor of the complex new rule, which is expected to slash the state's gasoline consumption by a quarter in the next decade. It seeks to expand the market for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and jump-start a host of technologies to replace corn-based ethanol as well as oil.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the “first-in-the-world low-carbon fuel standard,” noting that 16 other states are looking to California as a model and that President Obama has called for a national standard. It will “not only reduce global warming,” he said, “it will reward innovation, expand consumer choice and encourage the private investment we need to transform our energy infrastructure.”

The regulation requires producers, refiners and importers of gasoline and diesel to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuel by 10% over the next decade. And it launches the state on an ambitious path toward ratcheting down its overall heat-trapping emissions by 80% by mid-century — a level that scientists deem necessary to avoid drastic disruption to the global climate.

-- Margot Roosevelt

Comments

[savvydude]

Get ready, Californians. Your government has now set the pace to make your needed fuel the most expensive in the nation.

VOTE THESE IDIOTS OUT!

[Bugs222]

Way to go California! You've already shown the rest of the U.S. (and the world) over the past 30 years that it's possible to grow your economy while cutting per capita energy use and protecting the environment. On on on! Screw the climate deniers and those oil and auto-industry financed "skeptics" who clearly do NOT have the public's interest at heart.

[William Ernest Schenewerk, Ph.D.]

Hydrogen economy only works if done with atomic power. All other energy scenarios make CO2 worse. Suggest extracting D2O from electrolysis process. This requires returning condensate from hydrogen combustion in commercial vehicles back to electolysis. D2O is used as moderator in CANDU or modified RBMK reactors. D2O moderator allows frugal use of neutrons. Uranium supply is stretched. Thorium-U233 cycle is also a near-breeder with D2O moderator. Initial hydrogen production can go to ammonia for agriculture. Aircraft can burn LH2 and nearly double payload on long trips. Contrails will help cool the planet.

[TrafficBulldog]

But if you look at what is available

this is just a huge giveaway to ethanol

there is no other plan to reduce emissions in gasoline than adding ethonol...which irritates our lungs.

This is a small bandaid on the fact that we are running out of oil.

If they really want to do something about electric and hydrogen. Just legalize refueling of our vehicles at home.

The pump is the problem....and this effort today is all about the pump.

[Jim B.]

The smog police are at it again. More job security and empire building for them and the special interests that will also benefit. There's a straight forward solution that no politician has the guts to do-- set a minimum price for fossil fuels so that conservation and alternative energy technologies make sense to the average person.

Last year's gas price run up to almost $5/gal. did more to get people to drive less and drive more fuel-efficient vehicles more quickly than any law that the Arrogant Regulatory Bureaucrats could pass.

[Aletheia]

I'm usually not one to complain about the regulatory/administrative costs. But, I do wonder what the costs will be to me, at the pump, as a consumer so that the the producers and distributors of fuel can "reduce the carbon intensity of their fuel by 10%" over the next ten years. My guess is that it will be considerable. At least as considerable as the tax hikes on gasoline that were proposed as a way of balancing the state budget and then mothballed by the legislature. I think we might have been better off as a question of immediate benefits for the state budget and the state's ecology if we had kept those tax hikes in place and foregone the Air Resources Board's master plan. At the very least, the Air Resources Board and Arnold Schwarzenegger could hold off on these grand regulatory measures - and save us the starry-eyed justification that they will be both stimulus and engine of consumer choice - until the economy made a rebound (BTW, why didn't we see this during the boom times of gas-guzzling Humvees and disposable income?)

One more thought: The L.A. Times is a paper I turn to every day. In articles describing large-scale legislative or administrative plans, government reports, important judicial decisions, etc., I would like to see a little more explanation of what the supporting texts say, what experts say about them and so on. It would be great in blurbs like this one to see just a bit more reporting that goes beyond the press release and gets into things .

[alison]

why is this being done within the next DECADE?!!?
If we want to help save the world which we are destroying, we need to act now, and not in ten years, only by 10 percent.

[Linda Chambers]

Millions of idling cars is doing more to pollute the State's air than anything else. Drive-thru restaurants and banks should be outlawed.

[Joe Schmoe]

What a joke. So California has celebrated the Green's religious holiday, "Earth Day", with a new tax on gasoline? How else does one cut gasoline consumption by 25% in 10 years? And all because government-funded Luddites were able to write mathematical models that support their disdain for the internal combustion engine. Math models, by the way, that need constant retrofitting to explain away expanding ice levels in the Antarctic and dropping atmospheric temperatures. I thought there was supposed to be a separation of Church and State in America....

[jonnywonder]

Do any of you realize how silly this is? Now we're going to be poorer to prevent "climate change"? Does anyone actually READ ON THESE BOARDS? Journalists/Al Gore are NOT SCIENTISTS. CO2 makes up less than 0.5% of greenhouse gasses and DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL "WARMING". The fact is, this is just a method of govt-control from the top down. Methane, among other gasses, ACTUALLY contribute to global warming. CO2 does not. Why don't you morons pick up a scientific journal or even a college-level atmospheric textbook.

Idiots.

[Tom Anderston]

Typical LA Times readers, must be why the Times has financial trouble. What do these brilliant commenters think? Eliminate drive-thru banks, artificially drive the price of gas to $5 so that people "drive less", and completely buy into the hype of global warming! I especially like the guy that thinks California is booming, as it shifts its way to bankruptcy and companies are leaving in droves.

People get the government they deserve, and you can believe that by the low intellectual levels of most of the writers here.

[Mathew]

Would have been much simpler to do a carbon tax with an equal reduction in the income tax. But I guess this will do.

[Eric of Reseda]

Say what you will about Arnold, but his environmental policies are to be lauded. He knows that that unless we deal with climate change AGGRESSIVELY, pretty much everything else is a mott point. If we don't do everything we can over the next 50-100 years, goodbye civilization as we know it, hello Mad Max. Food shortages, mosquito-born diseases, massive drought, millions displaced by rising oceans, catastrophic weather conditions, power outages, etc., will render this planet a hotbed of anarchy.