Bush Clears Air on Pollution, but for California It’s Mainly Rhetoric

Large chunks of the clean-air package President George Bush unveiled with great fanfare last week are relevant to California only for the rhetorical tone of the press release and White House fact sheet.

Despite earlier rumors, the Bush Administration has endorsed the basic structure of the 1970 Clean Air Act, with its commitment to achieving health-based standards within enforceable deadlines and a strong federal program to push technological innovation as the means to limit pollution. Ambitious plans adopted earlier by the South Coast Air Quality Management District and tougher automobile emission standards recently enacted for new California cars by the state Air Resources Board are clearly acknowledged and, in watered-down form, proposed for the rest of the country. California air-quality officials have naturally greeted the Bush proposals with relief and even some cautious enthusiasm.

The Bush plan, although hard to evaluate because it lacks the specifics said to be in a coming message to Congress, will certainly allow state and local agencies to get on with the business of cleaning up industrial pollution--including smaller and more exotic sources like spray deodorants and back-yard barbecues. But the major cause of urban smog is our transportation system--cars, trucks, buses and the fuels they burn as we drive more of them each year over longer commuting distances. Taken together, vehicles cause more than 80% of Los Angeles smog. Unfortunately, there are some disturbing ideological signals in the President’s strategy for cleaning up current mobile-source pollution, and a total lack of vision for the future growth and direction of our transportation-based economy.

Bush’s plan would move the new-car standard for hydrocarbons--one of the two necessary ingredients for photochemical smog formation--toward the California standard within some unstated period of time. Nitrogen oxides, the other smog culprit, and carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas, are left at their current levels. This reflects the common consensus among automotive engineers that little more can be done to improve the emissions of cars with conventional engines using current fuels and certification procedures. Instead, Bush proposes to mandate, on a phased schedule, the introduction of cars using “clean” fuels, such as methanol, ethanol or natural gas, beginning in 1995. This clean-fuels initiative, although limited to the nine regions with the worst automotive pollution problems in the country, is ambitious enough to fulfill a campaign pledge to Midwestern farmers to put “corn in every car.”

Clean fuels are a necessary component of any strategy to meet and maintain clean-air goals in Southern California and other major metropolitan areas. California air and energy officials have been sponsoring research and development activities with alcohol-fueled cars for a decade. The spotty recent history of the national clean-fuels program parallels the experience of the 1960s and ‘70s with clean engines. Every year or two, some inventor or manufacturer comes up with a new design (or revives an old one that was lost or suppressed); publicity and public interest follow and legislation is introduced to mandate the new technology.

In the classic American folk legend, Preston Tucker and his clean, efficient car are steam-rollered by nasty corporate giants whose profits are threatened. Similarly, every so often we enjoy a photo-feature on some farmer whose truck operates happily on chicken droppings or corncobs. These stories aren’t false, they just don’t provide a good basis for federal law. We only have to look back a few years to find serious efforts to mandate diesel engines as a cleaner alternative to gasoline. Remember the Wankel engine, once touted as the solution to Detroit’s problems? Or Cornelius Dutcher and his steam-powered car?

Because elected officials lack the time, expertise and long-term focus to make wise choices about emerging technologies, Congress chose in 1970 to set long-term, tough standards beyond the reach of then-available emissions-control technology. Lawmakers then left the choice of method to the private sector, with strong guidance from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Ironically, Bush’s attempt to find a moderate environmental position, so clearly evidenced in the acid rain and toxics portions of the plan, appears to be a radical shift in philosophy. It directs a transformation of U.S. fuel usage, away from oil toward natural gas (the raw material from which methanol is produced, or which can be used directly as fuel in liquid or compressed form) and grain-derived alcohol.

The major obstacle to greater use of clean fuels is uncertainty about which fuel-engine combination will have the best score on a number of different tests, including cost to the ultimate consumer, performance in real-world driving conditions and actual--as opposed to laboratory--environmental benefits. The expense to producers, distributors, retailers and the general public of a complete changeover in basic fuel supply dictates caution on the part of industry in making major investments until there is a clear signal from government about which system will be subsidized through complex tax and regulatory incentives.

The results of the largest fleet- testing program on methanol, a leading competitor in the clean-fuel sweepstakes, was conducted by Carnegie-Mellon University. It unequivocally showed that air-quality benefits to be derived from total conversion are far less than earlier projections. That doesn’t rule out methanol as a future automotive fuel, but it strongly supports a more flexible approach to setting future standards.

Rather than mandating auto makers to build cars that run on a specified fuel or fuels, a strategy more likely to succeed in producing optimum clean-air benefits at least cost would be for Congress to set a medium-term 1995 emission standard of one-tenth of a gram per mile of hydrocarbons. That is less than half the toughest standard currently proposed, but only slightly lower than the standard proposed by the natural-gas industry for cars using the equivalent of methanol.

Give EPA some money--a modest but not unreasonable amount-- to convene task fores of technical experts from the automotive and energy industries to reach a recommendation, plus some additional development of production-line vehicles. And make the standard applicable for the full life of the car, not the 50,000 miles in current federal law, to eliminate the incentive to make emissions controls the least-durable car component.

An integrated approach to emissions from cars that reflects in-use performance and the wide range of possible fuels could lead to an added benefit: refineries, currently a major source of stationary source pollution, might close down and move out of the Los Angeles area. It might also lead to a multilevel auto market: reformulated gasoline used for longer commutes and travel; electric cars that could be plugged in at new, off-peak nighttime rates used for the second (or in Los Angeles, the third) family car.

The Clean Air Act technically expired years ago and has been kept alive by budgetary appropriations pending some agreement between the President and Congress on the future course of efforts to attain healthful air. Now that we have a President willing to make some real commitments to that goal, it’s time to look for a better way to approach the transformation of our transportation system as part of the solution.