PROMISES PROMISES

AUTO EMISSION FACTS AND FANTASIES
as reviewed by Gramps

Part 1 of 4 24/08/07

One can have the impression from the daily press that there is a great deal of regulation about what comes out of the tail pipe of motor vehicles. Here we are concerned with cars and light trucks, adding up to about 12% of transport's share of all emissions in Canada. The fact is there is no actual regulation in Canada, not much in the States (Federally) and none in Europe. What we have is a lot of voluntary agreements that involve averages for whole fleets, the total outputs of car companies, where the car companies tell their associations, and they tell the governments. If you believe any of these characters play the game straight go directly to the corner and put on the dunce cap.

That does not mean that there are not efforts to control and reduce the emissions, just that it is not going on mainly by regulation but on a voluntary basis that is a long way from satisfactory. Regulation is the setting of standards by the State followed by a legal requirement that everyone has to conform to it, together with testing, audits, penalties, fines, and so on. There are voluntary agreements in Canada and Europe. While the Auditor General in Canada has said what ought to be attached to a voluntary agreement for it to be useful, we do not have any of that in Canada and in the case of the tail pipe voluntary agreement that does exist with the car makers there are no such useful features such as third party verification, fixed goals with detailed progress reports, required testing and monitoring. Informed of what the Auditor General wants, the car makers in Canada have said they will think about that in their 2010 report. Since that is the end year of this agreement, we do not get much comfort from that, and the other side of that agreement, the government, has remained as quiet as a Church mouse.

So the MOU (Memorandum of Agreement) as the Canada one is called is not very sound. This is not a document in which the government and the auto industry agree to perform particular actions, it more like an agreement to watch or witness such actions performed in ways that have nothing to do with the agreement. As this agreement is voluntary no body has to do anything, anyone can leave when they want, the industry association (Canadian Vehicle Manufacturer's Association) that signed for the big car makers, or any of them,can leave. The government never will know, it seems, what is the tail pipe output of any car or any car company, just the fleet wide or company wide emissions and that is just a matter of the company telling its' association. No one on the public side will ever have any idea how much CO2 emissions were reduced by any particular measure, or how exactly the measuring was done or by whom. Some of the improvements will be the result of things that were done before the agreement was made, back to 1999, some are things done for safety reasons, most or perhaps all, we do not know for sure, are things that were done or will be done for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the agreement. It is stated in the document that it is not a legal agreement and does not create any rights anyone can claim, and in the car association web page (not in the agreement) the association repeatedly insists that there is no known technology to reduce CO2 emissions and the only control measure is to reduce the tailpipe output by driving less miles or getting more distance out of each liter of gas. Since tailpipe emissions are about 96% CO2, that is not very reassuring.

There is nothing new in this remarkably limited way of reducing emissions. We have had the same response in Canada to the problem since the 70s.We recall that when the Israelis were beating up on the Arabs back then the Arab countries that had formed an oil cartel, OPEC, turned off the oil tap to help the Arabs and sent the price sky rocketing. In fact, the price back then was quite a bit higher, in terms of the cost of living than it is now. During the subsequent 10 years of oil price wars the US government demanded that the car makers double the fuel economy within a decade, or by 1985 which they did without difficulty. Up to a point, with each model year, the industry game is to tempt the customer with more power, but that can be turned into greater fuel economy as a goal in the alternative. After 1985 there have been no more federal efforts in the US and the fuel efficiency has been going DOWN ever since then. This is because there have been some gains in the cars but they have been overwhelmed by the losses imposed on account of the market share of light trucks (SUVs). They have come out of the pick ups of that period to be about 50% of all sales in the US (40% in Canada) and their more generous standards are the reason for the decline. The car makers like to quote the performance of the cars only and clamor that things are still improving, but it is a lie. In the same way they claim they are only 1% of th problem in transport but they get to that by claiming that cars are 12% of the burden of tail pipe emissions and since new cars are only 8% of cars on the road then take 8% of !2% and hey presto! they are only 1% of the problem. When you are reading any industry propaganda you can remember this unusual approach they take to facts.

Since then there has been no further regulation, if what was done can be called that.New standards have been called for and used in various American states, the most outstanding being California. The Federal Regulator, the EPA, tried to set a national standard but was ordered off that course by the Bush administration on the basis of the idea that CO2 was not a pollutant, so the EPA standard or CAFE, was on old, until the Supreme Court of the USA decided that CO2 was a pollutant and the EPA could go ahead. But the Federal standard throughout has been a voluntary one, not a regulated standard.

California, due to its climate and population was the first to have serious problems with ozone destruction and smog, two main problems of tail pipe exhaust and it was therefore given the right of a "waiver" by the Federal government so that it could set its own standard and it did so, with a statute in 1962, It can be recalled that in Canada the first national highway (Trans Canada Highway Act), only came in 1949, and the road was not fully paved till 1962. This is why California has been the leader in this field since the 1950s. Later, other states were given the right to adopt the waiver or California standard and about 11 states have done so so far. This seems to be a regulated standard though complexities about its nature and implementation raise doubts. The Federal standard, called CAFE, has been used in California, but the present proposals to go from Tier 1 (where cars and SUVs have different levels) to Tier 2 ( where both will have the same one) seem to be political footballs in play at the moment in California.The State is also being sued by the large car makers who are attempting to stop California from using its standards. California is aiming to have standards that will be a third better than Tier 2 in 2016. So do 11 other states which have followed the California lead.

There was hope that this level of standard would become national within an Energy bill now working its way through the Federal legislative bodies, and it has been passed in the Senate but in the lower house, the House of Representatives, fuel efficiency standards were dropped from the bill by the Democratic Congress leaders apparently in order to get agreement on the rest of the Energy bill. It may be they will be restored in the Fall when the two legislative bodies consult to produce a single bill,but at the present there is no national standard that is enforceable as Regulated, and no new standard is approved by legislation.


In Canada we have just followed along after the Americans.Originally this was due to the way in which the Ozone and then the Smog problems developed in large urban areas, the fact that car manufacturing was concentrated among a few large (then) American firms, wherever the cars were assembled. An agreement was made at Montreal to deal with the emergency matter of the Ozone problem and later voluntary means were used to deal with smog. There was success here with the reduction of hydro carbons and carbon monoxide at the introduction of catalytic converters. And laws were passed, the Clean Air Act in the US in 1970 , and the Motor Vehicle Consumption Standards Act in Canada. We followed the CAFE standards, with ours called CAFC (Company Average Fuel Consumption) at 1976.

But the Canadian Act, though it was passed through Parliament, was never proclaimed in law, we went the route of voluntary agreements with the industry.

The most recent of these is the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) of April 2005 which is supposed to deal with auto emissions from 1999 to 2010. They had all the information from Federal studies Available at the end of 1999, they have been studying it for five years, they do not promise to achieve anything till the end of 2007, and they clam great success in having this agreement which will end at 2010 and today, at August 2007 we still do not have any detailed statement as to what if anything has been achieved so far.

Another problem in unraveling this history is the tangling up of the ideas of "clean" and "dirty". From pollution problems we have the idea of dirty, and the need to remove or clean up toxics in environments. But CO2 is not properly considered a pollutant and we learn in grade school how it takes up CO2 and releases Oxygen. But when Harper came into Office he followed the Americans in lock step and introduced a Clean Air Act which was actually a crowd of minor and often confusing amendments to our existing Environmental Statute, CEPA, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. In result we have the problems of working with climate change and toxics all tangled up in the same law, and people get the idea that we have to remove CO2 as a toxic.

These then are the main themes we find as we look into the question of whether we are achieving anything useful with steps taken in this field.

Part 2 to come.
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