Sticker Shock We Like: Higher MPG
When President Barack Obama announced stronger carbon-pollution and fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks in July, it turned out to be good news for the country's beleaguered autoworkers.
Thirteen automakers have agreed to support the new standards for vehicles, which will deliver 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. With new fuel-efficiency technologies, car companies will become more globally competitive and create thousands of new jobs. "The autoworkers' union understands that the future for them in rebuilding the job base is cleaner, more fuel-efficient car technology," says Roland Hwang, director of NRDC's transportation program.
A recent study conducted by NRDC, the United Auto Workers, and the National Wildlife Federation found that carbon pollution and fuel-efficiency standards previously put in place for 2012 to 2016 have already helped create or protect 150,000 jobs building components for cleaner cars. In total, the study found, more than 300 companies in 43 states and Washington, D.C., are developing and building new technology for the automotive industry, from advanced battery materials to improved transmissions.
"Now that standards are going to be ramped up further from 2017 to 2025," says Luke Tonachel, an NRDC vehicles analyst who worked on the study, "we expect even greater employment in a manufacturing sector that was hard hit by the recession and by oil price spikes that drove consumers away from big trucks and toward cars that were predominantly made overseas."
The fight to bring consumers efficient vehicles -- and eliminate millions of metric tons of carbon pollution, an amount equivalent to what is released by 72 coal-fired power plants annually -- was led by a diverse coalition with NRDC at the helm.
The unprecedented victory didn't happen overnight, though. It started several decades ago, when Congress first raised fuel-efficiency standards in 1975. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations boosted fuel efficiency from about 14 mpg to 27.5 mpg by 1985.
The decades rolled on, but those standards remained. It wasn't until 2002, when California grabbed the reins and decided to pass its own carbon pollution law using its special authority under the federal Clean Air Act, that the issue returned to the spotlight. Throughout, NRDC worked as one of the "primary sponsors of this seminal clean car law, which ultimately broke the gridlock in D.C.," says Hwang.
One by one, other states began to adopt California's standards. By 2007, "over a third of the nation was covered by the California clean car program," Hwang says. "We definitely had the automakers' attention."
But there was another hurdle. In 2003, the Bush administration had declared that the Clean Air Act did not apply to carbon dioxide emissions and could not be used to curb climate change. That position, if upheld, would mean the EPA couldn't set federal carbon pollution standards, and neither could California or the other states.
NRDC joined a coalition of states and environmental groups to challenge the Bush administration's ruling, taking their battle all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2007, the justices ruled in favor of the coalition, holding that it is the EPA's job under the Clean Air Act to protect public health and welfare from any dangerous pollution, including carbon dioxide.
Two years later, the Obama administration penned an agreement to cut carbon pollution and increase fuel efficiency to 35.5 mpg by 2016. A wide range of stakeholders, including every U.S. and foreign car company selling models in the United States, environmental organizations, the United Auto Workers, and individual states, backed the pact. The announcement this summer that these standards would be pushed to 54.5 mpg thrilled those who had dedicated years and even decades to curbing carbon pollution.
"I guess the first thing that comes to mind is, how do you top this?" Hwang says. "This is what I've been working on my entire career in the environmental sphere: raising fuel efficiency and reducing carbon pollution from cars."
These standards also mean job growth for a hard-hit industry in a shaky economy. "The American car industry is growing again," Tonachel says. "But if we hadn't pushed our industry, instead we'd be looking at thousands of lost jobs."
