Wheels: On E.U. Carbon Emissions Rule, First the Announcement, Then the Uproar

Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to E.P.A. Rules on Gas Emissions

The case is a sequel to Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 2007 decision that required the agency to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles if it found they endangered public health or welfare. Two years later, the agency made such a finding, saying that “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere” pose a danger to “current and future generations.” It set limits on emissions both from new vehicles and from stationary sources like power plants.

States and industry groups challenged the regulations on several grounds. They said the agency’s conclusions about the dangers posed by greenhouse gases were not supported by adequate evidence, that the so-called tailpipe regulations were flawed and that the agency was not authorized to regulate emissions from stationary sources.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year unanimously rejected the challenges, some on the merits and some on the ground that the parties before the court lacked standing to pursue them.

The Supreme Court accepted six petitions seeking review of that rejection, but it limited the issue it would consider to the question of whether the agency “permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouses gases.” Among the cases accepted for review was Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 12-1146.

“The regulations the court has agreed to review represent the Obama administration’s first major rule making to address the emissions of greenhouse gases from major stationary sources across the country,” said Richard J. Lazarus, who teaches environmental law at Harvard. “At the same time, the court declined to review E.P.A.’s determination that greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles endanger public health and welfare and therefore has left intact the government’s current regulation of motor vehicles emissions to address climate change.”

In urging the court to hear a challenge on the issue the justices agreed to hear, trade groups said the regulation of “greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources represents the most sweeping expansion of E.P.A.’s authority in the agency’s history, extending its reach to potentially millions of industrial, commercial, and residential facilities across the country, at costs estimated to run into the tens of billions of dollars per year.”

Environmental groups reacted to Tuesday’s developments by emphasizing the regulations the justices had let stand.

“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to deny numerous further legal challenges to E.P.A.’s science-based determination that six greenhouse gases threaten our nation’s health and well-being is a historic victory for all Americans that are afflicted by the ravages of extreme weather,” Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. “The justices have also declined to hear legal challenges to the broadly supported clean car standards that will strengthen our nation’s energy security, cut carbon pollution and save families money at the gas pump. ”

Greg Abbott, attorney general of Texas, one of the states challenging the regulations, said in a statement that he welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate that “the E.P.A. violated the U.S. Constitution and the federal Clean Air Act when it concocted greenhouse gas regulations out of whole cloth.”

The court on Tuesday also issued its first decision in a case argued this term, dismissing as improvidently granted an appeal in an employment discrimination case, Madigan v. Levin, No. 12-872. The court’s one-sentence order offered no explanation for the move.

The case concerned whether and when an age discrimination case may be brought under an old, broad civil rights law known as Section 1983 notwithstanding the more recent and focused Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

At the argument last Monday, the justices asked pointed and frustrated questions about whether the lower court had had the authority to decide the issue and whether the plaintiff, a former assistant Illinois attorney general, was covered by the newer law. The justices apparently concluded that the case was a poor vehicle for deciding the question they had agreed to review.

News Analysis: Emissions Rules Put Alternative-Fuel Vehicles in a Bind

WASHINGTON

THE Environmental Protection Agency’s latest proposed tightening of limits on sulfur in gasoline, and its previous rules, will most likely have the perverse consequence of retarding the development of cars running on batteries, advanced biofuels or hydrogen — all promising but expensive technologies that have not become mass-market products.

At the least, domestically produced gasoline and rapid advances in technology to make the internal combustion engine more efficient are likely to help the conventional automobile survive against competition from vehicles powered by electricity, natural gas and other cleaner alternatives.

The E.P.A. last week announced its proposed new Tier 3 rules sharply reducing allowable amounts of sulfur in gasoline, which would help automobiles’ catalytic converters to capture more pollutants. Tier 1, the E.P.A.'s first set of rules, was established two decades ago, under the Clean Air Act of 1990. Tier 2 was a refinement in 2000.

The specifics of the regulatory rules are hideously complex, with restrictions phased in gradually and covering only a fraction of the new cars and trucks each model year. They are applied to several categories, including “heavy light duty truck” and “light duty truck.” But the overall picture is clear: pollutants that in the bad old days were measured in grams per mile are now measured in tenths or hundredths of a gram per mile. In Tier 3 they are measured in thousandths of a gram.

Francis X. Lyons, a former E.P.A. administrator for the Great Lakes region, said that the agency’s latest proposed limits on sulfur in gasoline “simply extends indefinitely the viability of traditional automobile engines.”

Obscured by all the numbers is that the various technologies promoted as alternatives to gasoline — batteries, fuel cells or natural gas — are now facing a refined internal combustion engine. The federal government in large part drove automakers toward engine improvements by requiring them to essentially double fuel efficiency by 2025.

At the same time, the federal government has established mandates for increasing amounts of renewable fuels in the gasoline mixture. While that mandate has not yet worked out on the schedule Congress intended, it is clear that gasoline — the product that federal and state governments have been hoping for a quarter-century to replace with a variety of alternatives — is actually a moving target.

Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade association, compared the car to the person in Zeno’s Paradox who walks half the distance to an objective, and then half of the remainder, then half again of what remains. The person gets closer and closer but does not quite reach the end point, which in this case would be a car producing zero emissions.

“The alternatives are having a harder time keeping pace,” Ms. Bergquist said. “Once they were further ahead. Now it really is a horse race.”

The race is reflected in the E.P.A.'s mind-boggling terminology for clean cars. First there were Low Emission Vehicles, then Ultra Low Emission Vehicles. As the standards got even tighter, “ultra” was not enough, and there were Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicles. Then there were Zero Emission Vehicles, or ZEV, meant to be electrics, and then internal-combustion cars named, with no apparent sense of irony, Partial Zero Emission Vehicles.

The pursuit of an all-of-the-above strategy (a phrase popularized by President Obama but in practical use in the field of transportation energy and pollution since the early 1990s) assures that options will compete with each other, and not all will cross the finish line.

In the view of Mr. Lyons, the former E.P.A. official, the government can promote fledgling alternatives but not make them popular if the underlying technology is too expensive or inadequate to consumers’ needs. And among the technologies making strides are gasoline engines that are getting smaller, lighter and much more fuel efficient, he said.

Many environmental advocates, however, reject the idea that gasoline has an edge in a long-term competition with nonfossil fuels. Although environmentalists embrace the improvements in gasoline and the internal combustion engine, they say they are not meant to meet international goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

“We still need to get to an electric-drive fleet to meet our long-term carbon goals,” said Luke Tonachel, the director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He and other experts are still counting on a much greater penetration of electric vehicles, even if the vehicles have so far failed to become a mass-market product.

At the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Friedman, deputy director of the clean vehicles program, said that the Tier 3 proposal was a sign of success driven by the alternatives. “There is a long history of exactly this happening,” he said, recalling that when methanol was being promoted as a cleaner fuel the oil companies said, “'Hey, we can clean up our fuel, too.''’

Something cleaner will have to be developed, he said, because one-third of Americans live in places that are out of compliance with federal air quality rules at least part of the time, partly because of tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks.

In the meantime, he said, the competition was driving some air improvements. “You can connect the zero-emission vehicle mandate to the Tier 3 standards we see today,” he said. “ZEV set the long-term bar, and the auto industry innovated until they could meet some of those standards, and that’s where we got Tier 3.”

Wheels: No Silver Bullet for Reaching Fuel and Emissions Goals, Study Says

Rebecca Cook/Reuters “Limited range and long recharge times are likely to limit the use of all-electric vehicles mainly to local driving,” a report from the National Research Council says.

The United States could possibly achieve the goal of an 80 percent reduction in oil use and greenhouse gas emissions from cars and small trucks by 2050, but it will not be easy, a National Research Council report said.

Simply making conventional vehicles more fuel efficient cannot by itself bring the target within reach, the report, which was released on Monday, says. Average fleet fuel economy “would have to exceed 180 m.p.g.,” which “is extremely unlikely, at least with current identifiable technologies,” says the report from the council, which is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

The committee preparing the report focused on vehicles running on electricity, biofuels or hydrogen, as well as conventional cars and trucks with high-efficiency gasoline technology. The committee concluded that the wide deployment of at least two of them would have to be combined with strong federal policy if the goal were to be met. Natural gas vehicles were given credit for their ability to reduce oil consumption, but were faulted for their limited impact on carbon dioxide emissions.

“There’s no single pathway, no silver bullet adequate by itself to meet the goals,” Douglas M. Chapin, chairman of the committee, said in a conference call. “The goals are difficult but not impossible to meet if supported by strong national policies.” He added that even partial success “will yield valuable benefits.”

Government initiatives, the report says, could include fuel economy standards tougher than the federal goal for 2025 of 54.5 miles per gallon; support for research and development; rebate incentives for buyers of efficient cars and surcharges for inefficient purchases; and campaigns to familiarize consumers with the new options.

The report is somewhat pessimistic about electric car progress. Although battery costs may drop, the report said that “limited range and long recharge times are likely to limit the use of all-electric vehicles mainly to local driving.” Advanced battery technologies are being developed, it said, “but all face serious technical challenges.”

John M. German, senior fellow at the International Council on Clean Transportation, said in the conference call that the committee projected that the energy density of lithium-ion batteries could be two to three times greater than it was today and that the cost of a battery pack a quarter as much.

By 2050, vehicles with 100-mile-range batteries and hydrogen power could become cheaper than cars and trucks with advanced internal-combustion drivetrains, the report says. But there are other challenges. Fuel-cell vehicles avoid the range and recharging limitations of electric vehicles, the report says, but building a network of expensive hydrogen stations will be “difficult and expensive.”

Cellulosic biofuels show some promise and could lead to big reductions in oil use and greenhouse gas emissions, but “achievable production levels are uncertain,” the report says. It also envisions a possible future for biofuels that can be refined into a product that is chemically similar to gasoline.

The report also looked beyond the tailpipe. “To really impact automotive greenhouse emissions, you have to control energy sector emissions, starting with the oil and gas sector today and from power plants as electric cars enter the market,” John DeCicco, a committee member and research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, said in a telephone interview.