Delays on Clean Cars Assailed : Electric vehicles: The fight is over how best to reduce emissions and cut dense smog that has hovered over the Northeast for years.
Eleven months after President Clinton unveiled a partnership with auto makers to develop a cleaner car, the Administration is being accused of undercutting promotion of electric vehicles.
The controversy stems from a bitter dispute between the car manufacturers and state environmental officials from Virginia to Maine. The fight is over the issue of how best to reduce vehicle emissions and cut smog that hovered over the Northeast for years.
While the Environmental Protection Agency insists it is merely trying to fashion a plan acceptable to all sides, some state regulators and environmentalists accuse it of catering to the auto makers.
In a sharply written letter to EPA Administrator Carol Browner, the top environmental official in California recently accused the agency of working to reverse state-level development of clean-air programs like California’s.
“EPA should stick to the adoption of the best air pollution prevention measures, not convene clandestine negotiations to broker weaker ones,” wrote James Strock, California’s secretary for environmental protection. This happened after reports surfaced that EPA officials had been trying to broker a clean air deal for the Northeast.
A dozen Northeast states and the District of Columbia want to emulate the California plan. That plan would require the manufacture and sale of thousands of electric vehicles as well as “ultra-low” emission cars that run on natural gas.
This has raised the ire of the automobile industry, which has proposed its own plan to meet clean air requirements in the Northeast. It claims that emission reductions from vehicles can be met without having to sell electric cars in the region.
The manufacturers have sought out the White House and EPA to try to persuade the Northeastern states to go along with their proposal.
Next to Southern California, the Northeast has some of the worst smog problems in America. Under provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act, state officials must craft a blueprint for meeting air quality health standards early in the next decade. That requires car emissions to be cut roughly in half.
Two states, Massachusetts and New York, already have passed laws fashioned on the California standard. Like California, Massachusetts and New York require that 2% of all new car sales by model year 1999 be electric vehicles.
Under a coalition called the Ozone Transport Commission, all the Northeast states have proposed a solution similar to the one in California and are awaiting EPA approval. It includes a requirement for electric cars, although actual sales mandates would be up to each state.
The auto makers strongly oppose any requirement to sell electric cars and have filed lawsuits in New York and Massachusetts against the state mandates. They argue that an acceptable electric car with the range and size demanded by the public won’t be possible for some time at competitive prices.
“Mandating the sale of cars that don’t get bought or, if bought, don’t get driven very much, does nothing for air quality. That’s the real world,” argued Helen Petrauskas, vice president for environmental and safety engineering at Ford Motor Co.
Instead, said Andrew Card, president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Assn., which has spearheaded the Washington lobbying effort against the Northeast states, the EPA should adopt “a 49-state approach” to deal with air pollution.
He said the auto makers are prepared to produce and sell a cleaner gasoline-powered car for all states. The theory is that by selling cleaner-burning cars across the country, the smog-bound Northeast also would benefit because 10% to 15% of the driving in the Northeast is done in cars from outside the region.
In turn, auto makers would not have to produce electric or “ultra-clean” natural gas powered vehicles for areas outside of California.
But state officials who have crafted the Northeast pollution control plan say the auto makers’ proposal won’t allow them to meet the pollution reduction requirements of the 1990 Clean Air Act and only forces them to impose tougher pollution controls elsewhere--on businesses, factories or even lawn mowers.
“You don’t get the same emission reductions (from the auto industry proposal). . . . It’s not sufficient, period,” said Bruce Carhart, executive director of the Ozone Transport Commission, the regional agency created to develop the pollution control plan for the states from Virginia to Maine.
The regional plan envisioned cutting auto emissions in half by 2003. These include nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds, both of which contribute to smog.
Carhart said the auto industry plan would fall 15% to 30% short of that. And, he argued in an interview, there’s no assurance anyone could enforce a “49-state” clean car requirement since the federal air pollution control laws are less stringent than what the auto makers are offering. Congress intended for states, with federal approval, to impose more stringent requirements.
In a letter to President Clinton, the governors of Vermont, New York and Massachusetts recently urged the President to ask the EPA to stop negotiating with the auto makers and to adopt the Northeast states’ proposals. The governors reminded Clinton of his initiative last September in which the auto makers promised at a White House ceremony a new long-range partnership for developing a cleaner car.
EPA officials deny charges they are undercutting electric car development, but say they are only trying to find ways to get the auto makers and Northeast states to agree on a program that will put cleaner cars on the road sooner.
Browner’s assistant for air pollution programs, Mary Nichols, said the agency’s involvement has been misunderstood by some state regulators and that the agency has no intention of retreating on any air quality goals.
“We would not entertain a compromise that would achieve less environmental benefits than what (the Northeast states) asked us for,” Nichols said. “The emission reductions . . . are not negotiable. The only issue is, are there alternative ways to get there?”
While saying that electric vehicles “are part of our future,” Nichols also has urged the disagreeing parties to discuss other approaches including the auto industry’s 49-state clean car proposal.
