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    10 States, in Challenge to US, Plan Suit to Force Better Mileage Rules for SUVs
    By Danny Hakim
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 02 May 2006

    Albany - Ten states, including California and New York, plan to file suit this week to force the Bush administration to toughen mileage regulations for sport utility vehicles and other trucks.

    The suit, which the states are to announce on Tuesday, contends that the administration did not do a rigorous enough analysis of the environmental benefits of fuel economy regulations, as required by law, before issuing new rules last month for SUV's, pickup trucks and minivans. The suit will also claim that the government did not consider the impact of gasoline consumption on climate change when devising the new rules.

    While the states have initiated a number of suits over Washington's environmental policies, the new suit is the first to take aim at federal fuel economy regulations. With gasoline reaching $3 a gallon in many parts of the country, there has been a broad outcry for action but little consensus on what to do.

    Senate Republicans have proposed a $100 rebate to help taxpayers pay gas bills, a proposal that has been met with criticism even from the right, while President Bush has asked for Congressional authority to revise mileage regulations for passenger cars. He already has the authority to do so for SUV's and other trucks.

    California will be lead plaintiff in the suit, which also includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as New York City and the District of Columbia. Many of the same states have teamed up in other environmental suits against the administration, though with mixed success; a recent suit against the Environmental Protection Agency over power plant emissions was dismissed.

    "It's disappointing when you see power exercised to benefit the auto industry rather than consumers or environmental challenges," said Bill Lockyer, the attorney general of California, discussing the Bush administration's fuel economy rules.

    The attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas F. Reilly, said in a statement, "At a time when we are all facing a gas crisis, the Bush administration is pushing for fuel economy standards that appear to be authored by the oil and auto industries."

    Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said he could not comment on the suit because he had not seen it. But Mr. Tyson defended the regulations and said, "There's no question the analysis was rigorous."

    Several top Democrats, and also some Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, have called for tougher mileage requirements for SUV's, which must meet less stringent fuel economy guidelines because they are classified in the same category as light trucks, instead of with passenger cars.

    Late last year, the Bush administration unveiled the first broad overhaul of mileage regulations for SUV's, pickup trucks and minivans since the rules were created in the 1970's. Currently, each automaker's annual production of passenger cars must average 27.5 miles a gallon, while light trucks, which include SUV's, must average 21.6 miles a gallon in 2006 models.

    The administration's new system would take the single truck category and break it up into a number of smaller categories with varying requirements. Government officials predict that overall truck fuel economy will rise to 24 miles a gallon by 2011, though it will depend on the sales mix among SUV's and other trucks.

    Automakers have said the new regulations are tough enough.

    Jennifer Moore, a spokeswoman for the Ford Motor Company, referred to a previous company statement that commended the traffic safety agency for creating a new regulatory system that would "pose significant challenges" but also be "more equitable to every automaker."

    An overdependence on sales of large SUV's like Hummers, Chevrolet Suburbans and Ford Explorers is seen as among the reasons General Motors and Ford, the last two American-owned automakers, are suffering steep losses and closing plants.

    Environmentalists say the Bush administration's new truck fuel economy system will not do enough to curb oil consumption and adds uncertainty to a complex system already characterized by loopholes.

    In setting the standards, the administration "looked high gas prices, oil addiction and global warming squarely in the eye and blinked," said Daniel Becker, the director of the global warming program at the Sierra Club.

    The administration is, however, closing one loophole, an exemption that has left the largest SUV's, including the Hummer H2, outside the regulatory system.

    But the administration's rules are considerably less daunting than new California global warming emissions regulations that would force steeper fuel economy increases on vehicles sold there. New York is planning to pass similar air-quality rules. The industry is challenging the state rules in court, and the administration has strongly opposed the movement by states to regulate global warming emissions.

    Mr. Tyson, of the traffic safety agency, said many other factors were considered in addition to the price of gas, including "the ability of industry to be able to meet the standard."

    "You can't propose something that's not technically feasible for them to achieve," he added.

 

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    Californians Can Ease Energy Crisis by Enlightening World
    By Ian Hoffman
    The Argus

    Monday 01 May 2006

Amid the energy crisis, state sets an example.

    Berkeley - In the early 1970s, California faced a one-two punch of doubled oil prices and soaring electricity demand, with new coal and nuclear power plants projected for every eight miles of coast from San Diego to San Francisco.

    The plants were never built because a motley band of physicists and state lawmakers cut energy demand down in ways as ambitious as reinventing the fluorescent light bulb and as simple as slapping energy-usage labels on refrigerators.

    They also retooled the electricity market so power companies spent money helping people use less energy. Utilities were investing in selling less electricity, but they did not have to build 16 power plants and were guaranteed payback on what they did build or buy. The state's economy kept growing even though Californians on average consume 40 percent less energy than other US citizens.

    Scientists said Friday that exporting California's energy-saving recipe to the rest of the nation, as well as to China and India, is the first, lowest-cost and sacrifice-free answer to the global problems of rising fossil energy prices and greenhouse warming.

    "This was and remains the lowest-hanging fruit," Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Lawrence Berkeley Lab director Steve Chu said Friday. "But it cannot solve it all."

    Ultimately, scientists say, the solution lies in revolutionizing the global energy supply to replace the 80 percent filled by oil, natural gas and coal with carbon-free energy sources. But the speed and size of that transformation depend on energy demand.

    If nations wanted to hold the global rise in temperatures to less than 4 degrees Fahrenheit while keeping their economies growing, a half-percent increase in energy efficiency by 2050 will make the difference between replacing the equivalent of all fossil energy supplied today with carbon-free energy and having to come up with twice that amount without the extra efficiency, according to an analysis by John Holdren, a Harvard energy expert and president of the nation's largest scientific society.

    "The potential of what we could get is a whole lot bigger on the demand side than what we could get on the supply side," Holdren said Friday at a Berkeley symposium honoring Abe Rosenfeld, a Berkeley physicist considered one of the founders of energy efficiency concepts.

    Climate scientists say rising concentrations of greenhouse gases from human fossil fuel burning have pushed average global temperatures up by more than a degree, mostly since the 1970s. Because greenhouse gases persist in the atmosphere for decades, scientists say, another degree of warming is inevitable due to current emissions.

    Many scientists now believe a doubling of pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is unavoidable, with at least another degree or two of warming that many scientists believe could melt the Greenland ice sheets and raise global sea levels as much as 20 feet.

    Dozens of coal-fired plants are planned in the United States, but hundreds are planned in India and China, which is projected to surpass the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2020.

    The rest of the United States already is inching in a California direction on energy efficiency. Last year's federal energy act borrowed 16 of the state's 2004 appliance and building standards and made them law for the rest of the country, ending five years in which the federal government failed to upgrade any of its standards.

    Energy scientists said there's a lot more to be done nationally and in California. More than 70 percent of greenhouse emissions from electricity generation are tied to powering buildings, especially in wealthy, developed countries, said Robert Socolow, a Princeton energy analyst.

    "It suggests we're moving more and more to a world where it's the electricity in buildings that's the problem," he said. "We've got to learn, and California can teach us. It suggests we have to reinvent the building."

    Rosenfeld, now serving on the California Energy Commission, has plenty of ideas.

    His latest passion - cool roofs - just became the rule in California. If a building has a flat roof and no architectural reasons against it, the roof has to be white to reflect incoming solar energy and save up to 20 percent on air-conditioning costs. For people who don't like light-colored roofs, Berkeley scientists invented dark roofing tiles that reflect 30 to 40 percent of the infrared light that warms homes and drives up summer electricity bills.

    So far, scientists calculate that applying the same idea to cars will save 2 to 3 percent on fuel economy.

    "People keep asking me, 'Have we used up all the low-hanging fruit?'" Rosenfeld said. "We seem to be a long way from physical limits on refrigerators, air conditioners, cars, what have you. We've got a long way to go."