Obama To Let States Determine Emissions Standards
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Cars, Energy, Environment
This should be welcome news for all of you Federalists.
WASHINGTON — President Obama will direct federal regulators on Monday to move swiftly on an application by California and 13 other states to set strict automobile emission and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday.The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and signifies a sharp reversal of Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions would be one of the most emphatic actions Mr. Obama could take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.
Mr. Obama’s presidential memorandum will order the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Bush administration’s past rejection of the California application. While it stops short of flatly ordering the Bush decision reversed, the agency’s regulators are now widely expected to do so after completing a formal review process.
Once they act, automobile manufacturers will quickly have to retool to begin producing and selling cars and trucks that get higher mileage than the national standard, and on a faster phase-in schedule. The auto companies have lobbied hard against the regulations and challenged them in court.
So Obama continues to undo many of the policies of the Bush administration, but does this one make sense? After all, having a patchwork of different emission standards seems like it might not be the best for the auto industry’s economic health.
Still, one has to think that automakers would simply make cars that adhere to the highest standards and continue on from there.
More as it develops…
This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Cars, Energy, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 26th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
If memory serves (and no doubt someone can correct me if I’m worng) we don’t get a patchwork of standards because the law was written carefully. States can either take the (weaker) Federal standard or 1 of one alternative (stronger) standard. So that particular problem isn’t that major.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Do you remember when the car manufacturers started offering special “California cars” at a premium? Have you noticed that they don’t do that anymore, but have standard “50 states emissions”? No, we won’t see GM and Ford offering cars with special emissions depending on the destination state except on a temporary basis. In the end they will simply comply with the toughest standard. And that is the goal!
[devils_advocate] Really, nobody is forcing them to sell vehicles in all 50 states. If the new standards are too onerous, why not just choose not to do business in those states? [/devils_advocate]
January 26th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
It will be interesting to see how each state deals with this issue. In some ways it would be a good thing to allow states to take care of their own as it would seem to be more an individual decisions, but can we trust our worthy Statesmen and women to do whats right for us and the environment.
If we went back to horse and buggy then we would have people to count the horse air emissions. HA…
January 27th, 2009 at 7:58 am
I’m not a federalist, but this is federalism as a matter of convenience, not principle.
The cars that automakers will be forced to manufacture will be ones that meet the sum of all of toughest standards that each state can devise. That means that California will largely get to dictate what everyone gets.
Since I worked in oublishing, I am VERY familiar with this notion. Ed content must meet each state’s standards, so much time, effort, and money goes to figuring out each state’s standards and coming up with products that meet the big states guidelines, along with plans for how to alter the products to comply with other states.
It’s an extremely wasteful way of doing things. Every state duplicates the efforts of every other state, using way more resources than necessary, Then after all the sturm and drang, they agree about 90% of the stuff, leaving content producers to come up with 50 plans for each state’s divergent 10%. Lots of paperwork ensues, along with all the resources used to review and comply and so on. Then time passes, and given states decide to rethink things and they tweak their standards, changing which 10% they don’t agree on.
And here’ the thing. This dynamic is probably GOOD for producers because they have to keep producing slightly modified stuff. But it’s bad for the states wasting money constantly re-inventing the wheel. And it’s bad for localities who pay a lot more for products because the price is strongly based on the resources expended to produce it.
This change WON’T lead to revolutionary advancements in auto technology. The physics of weight and energy are what they are, and won’t respond to individual state’s mandates any more than federal ones. For example, no one has found a really good way to get around the way physics dictates that decreasing weight to increase fuel efficiency compromises safety. Improvements in materials have mitgated the effets of this dynamic, but fundamentally, it endures.
Researchers in various fields may well come up with great new ideas. I hope they do. If we can come up with a decent source of alternative energy that results in less pollution, I’m all for it.
All these changes WILL do is add a bit to the price for a new car, because automakers will have to expend additional resources on compliance.