Features

SACRAMENTO — California has opened a new front in the battle between automakers and environmental coalitions, becoming first in the nation to target auto emissions to combat global warming. 

But no technology exists to fight the emissions of carbon dioxide, which helps cause global warming, from automobiles. So, automobile manufacturers say, the only response to the proposal in California’s Legislature is to sell smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. 

Years after California began regulating toxic tailpipe pollutants from the state’s ever-growing fleet of 25 million vehicles, lawmakers now want to limit carbon dioxide, an unregulated nontoxic emission that many scientists believe is warming the earth’s atmosphere. 

They succeeded in part Wednesday, as the state Assembly, encouraged by a group that includes environmentalists, high-tech business executives, scientists and celebrities such as Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, passed a vehicle-related global warming bill. 

The bill gives automakers until early 2005 to start cutting carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles sold in California. It now goes to the Senate. 

Automakers who sell approximately 2 million new cars, light trucks and sport utility vehicles yearly in California, believe they’re already beaten. 

“We’re expecting a law to be passed,” said Kris Kiser, vice president of state affairs for the 13-member Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. “It’s an election year. The issue has a core constituency and it’s a powerful one for the Democrats.” 

Automakers see the bill as a backdoor way to force more fuel-efficient vehicles into the state, she said, warning that “California consumers are looking at smaller, lighter vehicles and some models may be eliminated.” 

The vote is disgusting, Kiser said, because carbon dioxide can’t be measured from a car’s tailpipe. 

That doesn’t matter, supporters said. There’s been a “perception shift” about carbon dioxide from cars, and the bill by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, is California’s answer to a sometimes-disputed international phenomenon called global warming. 

The Bluewater Network and Natural Resources Defense Council, environmental organizations that sponsored the bill, say California contributes nearly 7 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases — and 2 percent of all global carbon dioxide. Of that, California’s cars and trucks contribute up to 60 percent of those emissions. 

“If California starts doing something in this regard I think other states will follow,” Pavley said. 

Pavley’s bill tells the California Air Resources Board to write regulations by January 2004 to get the “maximum feasible reduction” of carbon dioxide from cars and trucks. The Legislature would have a year to decide if the regulations were reasonable. If so, they would begin in 2005. 

That would be groundbreaking, said air board spokesman Jerry Martin, although “manufacturers would need time to develop the hardware or software to limit the emissions.” 

By most accounts, carmakers have no existing technology to limit carbon dioxide emissions, a natural byproduct of combusting carbon-based fuel. 

“An enormous amount comes out of the tailpipe,” said Peter Miller, a senior scientist with the NRDC. “It far exceeds the amount of other pollutants.” 

Miller suggested numerous alternatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, including better tires, alternative fuels, better fuel efficiency, buying equivalent reductions from other CO2 sources, carpooling, transit and better urban planning. 

“If it was easy, it would have been done,” Miller said. 

Pavley said car manufacturing representatives wouldn’t talk about such recommendations with her before the bill passed. 

“They said they had none. They didn’t want any regulatory reform,” she said. 

Kiser admitted as much. 

“We said, ’how do you fix it? To regulate carbon dioxide you regulate fuel use. It’s that simple for us.” 

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On the Net: Read AB1058 at www.assembly.ca.gov. 

Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers: www.autoalliance.org.