Streetsblog Los Angeles

Where we live has an enormous impact on energy use, according to new research commissioned by the EPA. The report, “Location Efficiency and Housing Type — Boiling It Down to BTUs” finds that Americans use far less energy if they live in an apartment building in a transit-oriented neighborhood than if they live in a detached suburban house, even if that house has green building features and sports fuel-efficient cars in the driveway.

When it comes to this report, a picture’s worth a thousand words. As the graph above shows, the biggest energy efficiency gains come from living in transit-oriented neighborhoods.

A household living in a single family detached house located in a typical sprawl development uses an average of 240 million BTU (British Thermal Units, a unit of energy output) of energy a year, while the same household would only use 147 million BTU if the exact same house were located in a compact neighborhood. Make that single family house an apartment and energy use is down to 93 million BTU.

“While energy efficiency measures in homes and vehicles can make a notable improvement in consumption, the impact is considerably less dramatic than the gains possible offered by housing type and location efficiency,” the authors write. The ideal solution, of course, is to combine smart growth with green technology.

The report serves as a high-level rebuke to those who dismiss the importance of smart growth for curbing energy use, a point of view that was reinforced by a recent report from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. While putting a stop to the country’s many sprawl-inducing policies may not be easy, the EPA’s numbers show it’s necessary.

Environment California has been leading the charge for a cleaner automobile fleet for California and the rest of the country for years.  Earlier today, they released a new report, Gobbling Less Gas for Thanksgiving, promoting a “sixty miles per gallon” fuel efficiency mandate for American cars to be in place by 2025.  If that goal seems unrealistic considering that the average miles per gallon for the American fleet is only 26.4 miles per gallon today, consider that recent studies show that American cars are 99% cleaner today than they were fifty years ago.

To view the report, click here.

As the Obama administration considers new fleet-wide fuel efficiency and global warming pollution standards for cars and light trucks through 2025.  Despite election results in November that would suggest that environmental concerns aren’t at the top of voters’ to-do list for the White House, Environment California notes that almost three-quarters of American voters (74%) support a sixty miles-per-gallon standard when polled.

And when it comes to fuel efficiency, the Obama Administration practices what it preaches.  Nearly one-quarter of all hybrid cars bought since January 19, 2009 from Ford Motor Company and General Motors were purchased by the Federal Government.

While some find this a sign that hybrids and alternative fuel vehicles aren’t capable of earning a market share without record-high gas prices, others find it encouraging that the administration isn’t just setting standards while still cornering the market on gas guzzlers.  Bloomberg news reports:

“It is good that the government leads by example,” Dan Becker, director of the Washington-based Safe Climate Campaign, said in an interview. “At a time when we’re just beginning the era of the hybrid, it’s a positive sign that the government is stepping up to the plate and helping build that market.” Read more…

The E.P.A. is considering new "fuel economy stickers" for new cars. This one is favored by the industry. A better explanation of the stickers can be found here.

This Thursday, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is coming to town to hold a public hearing on the design of new fuel economy stickers that will be placed on “for sale” cars.  The agency, in partnership with the USDOT, will select either the sticker type pictured above, or a more simple “letter grade” sticker that would have an “A, B, C, or D” letter grade and a brief explanation of the grade. The new sticker will be the first change in environmental information given to consumers in three decades.  The hope is that by informing car buyers of the environmental consequences of their vehicle choice that they’ll make better choices.

The hearing details can be found at the end of the article.  If you wish to testify in person, you have to email lucie.audette@epa.gov ahead of time.  If you’d rather testify online, you can do so by clicking here.

At an earlier hearing on the new stickers held in Chicago, two familiar factions each backed a different sticker.  Environmentalists favor the “letter grade” sticker because its easy to understand.  The automobile industry prefers the more detailed yet confusing one pictured above.  Environmentalists seem thrilled that the government is considering an easy way to warn drivers away from the worst polluting vehicles.  Meanwhile, car dealers are worried.  After all, these stickers could end up being the “Surgeon General’s Warning” for cars. Read more…

The Obama administration today released its final rule raising U.S.
auto fuel-efficiency standards to an average of 35.5 miles per gallon
(mpg) by 2016, winning plaudits from environmental groups while
offering extra benefits to makers of electric and luxury cars.

Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, at left, with EPA chief Lisa Jackson at right. (Photo: Getty Images)

The
final rule was jointly unveiled by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood
and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lisa Jackson, who
described the higher fuel standards — known as CAFE, for Corporate
Average Fuel Economy — as "a win for automakers and drivers, a win for
innovators and entrepreneurs, and a win for our planet." 

Environmental advocates joined the auto industry in
welcoming the higher CAFE standards, which the EPA estimates would
yield $240 billion in total benefits over the life of the rule –
compared with a total cost of $52 billion for carmakers and drivers.

“By
completing these rules, the Obama administration is putting our country
on the road to creating thousands of clean energy jobs and cutting our
dangerous dependency on oil," Roland Hwang, transportation director at
the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.

Dave
McCurdy, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, urged
the White House to follow the rule by beginning "to work on [fuel
standards for] 2017 and
beyond.” 

The new CAFE rule includes a notable break for
electric cars, giving a zero-emissions rating to the first 200,000 such
vehicles made by each manufacturer despite the fact that carbon
emissions would result from the power needed to charge them.

Jackson
said the benefit was included to bolster the administration’s "bullish"
stance on plug-in technology. "We all know that’s not entirely true,"
she acknowledged of the government’s zero-emissions designation,
"because when you plug in, there’s
some emissions associated with the power you’re using  … but we
wanted to incentivize them."

In the text of the final rule,
the EPA described its 200,000-vehicle zero rating as a compromise with
green groups that objected to its initial proposal to offer the rating
to all electric vehicles.

"Many
state and environmental organization commenters
believed that the combination of these incentives could undermine the
GHG [greenhouse gas] benefits of the rule, and believed the emissions
compliance values
should take into account the net upstream GHG emissions associated with
electrified vehicles compared to vehicles powered by petroleum based
fuel," the rule’s authors wrote.

The EPA’s earlier proposal
also had included a "multiplier" that would effectively count electric
or hybrid cars as more than one vehicle when automakers calculated the
average fuel efficiency of their fleets. The final rule, however,
abandoned the "multiplier" concept.

The benefit for luxury carmakers, nicknamed the "German provision,"
would give manufacturers selling fewer than 400,000 cars per year in
the United States extra time to comply with the new fuel rules between
the model years of 2012 and 2015. Automakers which stand to gain from
that efficiency "lead-time allowance" include BMW and Mercedes.

The
EPA and U.S. DOT estimated that their stronger fuel-efficiency standard
would increase the average cost of cars by $950 as of the 2016 model
year, but Jackson noted that most auto buyers would "offset the costs"
by saving on fuel bills during their first three years of driving.

Asked
about the auto industry’s eagerness for certainty from the federal
government for 2017 and beyond, LaHood told reporters that "anything
post-2016 will come after people get a good week of sleep … they’ve
been working night
and day to get this right."

Government subsidies for hybrid and electric cars, while
"politically seductive," will fail to achieve the Obama
administration’s national pollution-reduction goals if they are not
coupled with a significant increase in fuel prices, according to a new study by Harvard University researchers.

(Photo: Pop and Politics)

The
team at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
used U.S. Department of Energy economic models to evaluate six possible
outcomes for Washington’s newly reinvigorated push for a 17-percent cut in U.S. emissions by 2020, in keeping with President Obama’s pledge at the global Copenhagen climate talks.

Five
of the Harvard team’s six outcomes assumed a future carbon price of $30
per ton (higher than the price envisioned in the House-passed climate
bill) that rises over time, with other tweaks added to the system,
including continued government tax credits for hybrid and electric
vehicles, an immediate 50-cent hike in the gas tax, and more increases
in auto fuel-efficiency standards.

The researchers
concluded that taxpayer-funded clean-vehicle credits "are expensive and
not particularly effective at reducing CO2 emissions, at least in the
near term." In order to trim transportation’s 30-percent contribution
to total U.S. emissions, the Harvard team recommended an
all-of-the-above approach:

[O]ptions now being
discussed in Congress cannot by themselves achieve the significant
reductions in the transportation sector needed to meet the Obama
administration’s targets for total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by
2020. The most effective policy for reducing CO2 emissions and oil
imports from transportation is to spur the development and sale of more
efficient vehicles with strict efficiency standards while increasing
the cost of driving with strong fuel taxes. Without addressing both,
CO2 emissions from the U.S. transportation sector will continue to grow.

Of course, higher gas taxes are as anathema to politicians as clean-car
subsidies are alluring — which is leaving green groups wary of a
bipartisan Senate proposal
to include a new motor-fuel fee in climate legislation. The oil
industry has said it prefers a new carbon tax on fuel because companies
can more easily pass on the costs to consumers, attributing the resulting gas-price hikes to congressional climate action.

From the Harvard researchers’ perspective, however, expensive fuel is merely a means to an end.

Read more…

(Photo: snoweyes via Flickr)

Can you answer this riddle?

A town maintains a fleet of vehicles for town employee use. It has two types of vehicles. Type A gets 15 miles per gallon. Type B gets 30 miles per gallon. The town has 100 Type A vehicles and 100 Type B vehicles. Each car in the fleet is driven 10,000 miles per year. The town’s goal is to reduce gas consumption and thereby reduce harmful environmental consequences.

Choose the best plan for replacing the vehicles with corresponding hybrid models:

a. Replace the 100 vehicles that get 15 miles per gallon (mpg) with vehicles that get 20 mpg.

b. Replace the 100 vehicles that get 30 miles per gallon (mpg) with vehicles that get 40 mpg.

c. a) and b) are equivalent.

d. I don’t know.

The answer is a, but a 2008 study by two Duke University researchers found that most who answer the question incorrectly choose b. After all, a 10-mpg increase in the same number of vehicles sounds a lot better than a 5-mpg hike, right?

Read more…