PROMISES PROMISES

AUTO EMISSIONS FACTS AND FANTASIES

Part 2 of 4 25/08/07


While this history has unfolded in the US in Çanada we were following along, tied to their industries and limited by their politics, as we chose the voluntary route.The Act that we had passed in 1976 languished unproclaimed and even today could well be the starting point for genuine regulation. We just need a government that will proclaim it, order the car companies to publish their data, compel standards,and move to enforce them.

Today there is no truly native Canadian car company to be found in the CVMA though most of the European and all the American large car firms are. The government had developed two massive and detailed studies of the industry by the end of 1999 and these were used to develop a voluntary standard. The period to be covered by the plan was 2000 to 2010, but since the agreement was not actually signed till the Spring of 2005 and no actual improvements were due till late 2007, and no actual facts about any real change or improvement have even been claimed to date, the plan has not had a good start, despite the blustering of the car companies web page which goes on about how things are "well in hand" whatever that means.

In the auto industry as the car has evolved using the internal combustion engine we have a very large number of moving parts and an extremely inefficient use of gasoline. With each model year there are improvements, and since there have been a small number of large manufacturers, there has tended to be a grand procession of tiny steps, with little real change each year, but a great deal of publicity suggesting miracles are being delivered. This way the car makers make the most money, at minimum risk. Most of the changes are purely cosmetic, some are for safety reasons, some relate to incorporating new subsystems to the car, and those that are essential to the problem of engine efficiency tend to require a choice between power and efficiency. More of one is less of the other. Once the big boost of the oil shock had been delivered from 1973 forward to 1985, the car makers happily moved away from efficiency toward power, and they have never looked back. The whole system of small changes bumps along to keep the customer happy with new features each year, there is no cut throat competition. It is really a sort of socialism for the car makers, and it has a very bad effect on attempts to reduce tail pipe emissions.

In result over a period of 5 years we see a very gradual improvement in fuel/ mileage but it is swallowed in the much worse performance of the ever more popular SUV. In total, fuel mileage goes down year after year, and this is made worse by the trade off between power and efficiency. Plainly, the car makers have shown for 20 years that they will not deliver on fuel efficiency unless they are compelled to.



In 2005 when the government and the car makers finally produced an agreement to stretch to 2010 the manufactures say they agreed to "commit" to obtain a "reduction" of 5.3 million tonnes CO2 equivalent of tail pipe emissions by 2010. It is plain that the members of the CVMA (Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Assoc.) agreed to do this through their association, without any one company undertaking to do anything specific or in any time frame. Of course. the agreement was not even a legal instrument and was totally voluntary anyway. But it seems to be the case that neither the government or anyone outside the car makers and their association has any idea what any of them has done, what are the tail pipe facts for any company and how, if at all, that has changed since 1999 or since April 2005. The agreement and later two so called Progress Reports that have been produced have long lists of specific technical features that each company proposes. But there is no statement to be found if any of these ,and which ones, have actually been done, or what effect any of them had. In Europe it has been a problem to get the car companies there to produce any data on any of their operations, so it would be no surprise to see that as a problem here. The two Progress Reports are just ad copy that contain many, many repeats of the claim that they will reduce emissions by 5.3 Mt CO2e, but very little else. There is no data on what their emissions were at 2005, what they are now, how each company has changed, if at all, or how they are in fact progressing towards the goal.

When the Auditor General of Canada produced a report at September of 2006 setting out what voluntary agreements should contain if they are to be of any use at all, that was before the car makers came out with their second Progress Report so they could not simply ignore the AG. But what they said was that they were not going to do anything now and they would consider that for their final report. Apparently then we shall see no third party monitoring, no fixed standards, no step by step schedule, no before, during, and after data, no tests, no real controls at all. We know the car makers have been large scale liars about every feature of their vehicles for decades and a huge campaign was necessary to bring in elementary safety features to reduce the carnage on the roads. Now the government has permitted this crowd of large scale proven liars to say "trust us" when there is absolutely no reason to do so based on their past record. True to form they now seek to simply ignore the Auditor General of Canada.

One of the most curious features of this agreement of April 2005 between the Federal Government and the CVMA car makers is the stated reduction to be achieved of 5.3 Mt CO2e. Since the whole agreement has a lot of vagueness to it, it was only signed when its originally expected period of operation was more than half over, and the car makers do not have any target they must meet, why the apparent certainty of such a figure? Why 5.3, why not 3 or 5 or 8?

We should mention that the tail pipe produces many gases, 96% of them CO2 but quite a number of others including some toxics. The scientists have worked out a compound number to take into account the main ones, and it is based on values for some of the minor gases at much more than one to one. For example a tonne of Nitrous Oxides is taken at 21 compared to 1 of CO2 and a tonne of Volatile Organics at 310 times one of CO2. So the single number of 5.3 Mt COt2 is supposed to represent all of what comes out the tail pipe.

Some of the improvements that the manufacturers had already done by 2005 would improve particular emissions but it seems that all of them are long since well known in the industry. In California, a study was produced on the Canadian voluntary plan that described it as an agreement to witness the improvements rather than one to perform them since most or all of the items listed for each of the car companies were things that were done already or would be done regardless of the Agreement. The author of the study was able to estimate to a fine level of detail how much CO2 emissions would be reduced with each one. He showed that if the car makers took credit as reduction for all these planned improvements they could easily make 5.3 tonnes reduction by 2010, but if they could not successfully claim them all they would not be able to. No such detail at all is to be found in the publications that are available for the MOU. What credit will be claimed and what will be agreed is also totally vague as it seems all Canada waits (it is now August of 2007 on an agreement evolved to deal with 1999 to 2010 though signed in 2005) to see what the car makers will claim and what the Federal Government will agree to in some form of committee. One could safely predict the car makers will demand all of them, and the government will agree.


As to the overall figure it turns out that when one examines the studies produced by the Federal government and available to the car makers in 1999, one can see the number of CO2 equivalent levels for the transport sector of the economy, and the car makers share of that for their fleets of cars, in 1999, and what it was expected to grow to by 2010. If one just deducts 1999 from what was expected in 2010 one will not get anywhere near the reductions claimed of 5.3. The gap is much wider than that. But if one takes the amounts that can be expected to reduce emissions based on the lists of items planned by the car makers, one gets a number very close to the 5.3. Such estimates can be done by review of the California university study of the Canadian voluntary agreement, which has detailed estimates for every planned measure. So it seems the car makers were not guided to reduce their share of emissions by deducting any figure from what the government expected to see transport emissions rise to by 2010. They just added up what they planned to do in the normal development of their products without any consideration at all of national concerns and used that figure as what they would contribute to emission reduction.


The trouble is that is essentially no real reduction at all The car makers have just listed what they would do if there was no MOU agreement at 2005 at all. And by getting government to negotiate this agreement, they have given the appearance of contributing to climate control when they intend nothing of the kind. The government has been taken, good and proper. The government has not served the nation well at all in this matter.

As well we see when we follow the publications in the CVMA web page, and the Progress
Reports, and the government studies at the beginning, that the car makers have got the government to get involved in great long detailed discussions that are not helpful to emission control. They are useful to the car makers who want to talk about highly graduated schedules narrowly differentiating each of their cars, and extremely detailed consideration of what their plans are to attract and please their customers. The government interest should not be in this area, but in determining what can be done and setting standards to get it done as soon as possible. The MOU is a total failure in this regard.

Again, the government has been conned. There is a great amount of talk in the MOU and its surrounding studies and web page discussion about customer preference and choice, which leads to softening of the standard sought and gradually the conversation, so to speak, is moved to the "consumer choice" area where the car makers want it to be, instead of in the area of achieving regulation that it urgently required. Reducing CO2 emissions gradually is replaced by producing and selling more cars and promoting the car culture. The goal should be to reduce the car culture.

The MOU is against the best interests of Canada, and the car makers have enlisted the government to promote their cause. As one result of this unhappy tale Canada is failing badly in emission standards, being only a little better than the US which is at about 250 where Canada is 220. The EU and Japan are in the area of 150, on a normalized standard created by the Pew Center on Global Climate
Change. These last two are now aiming at severe further reductions. And in Canada we cannot even be very confident that the standards we think we have are operational since it is not clear that our government knows what the car makers are individually producing.



Part 3 to follow