California Standard or Bust

I’m admittedly very uneducated regarding environmental issues, but hey, I’ve got to write about what I’m assigned. This piece is centered around the years-long struggle over the so-called “California emissions standards” for automobiles.

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The Planet’s Causes Are Our Causes

 

            Lately, it has become in vogue for politicians to pay lip service to environmental issues and causes such as emissions control and alternative energy. All of the presidential candidates from both parties pretended to be interested in ethanol while campaigning in Iowa, and even Bush rarely gives a State of the Union address without making some oblique reference to far away technologies such as hydrogen fuels and nuclear fusion. But like with many popular issues, verbal support for vague generalities tends not to coincide with policies and actions; in the case of carbon emissions, many politicians (particularly conservatives) who voice support for conservation will balk at any actual efforts that may prove inconvenient for industry.

 

In the past few months, we’ve seen this all too clearly in the case of “California emissions standards,” which refers to that state’s (and many others’) attempt to enforce greatly reduced tailpipe emissions and set the minimum gas mileage for all new cars at 43 MPG by 2017. This goal is not unrealistic; in Europe, most of the conditions set by the California standard have long since been met. California has often been the trailblazer when it comes to setting new bars to protect the environment and our wallets, and this time was going to be no different: over a dozen states expressed support for copying the California standard for themselves, a big step towards national regulation.

 

One would think that this proposal would be accepted, if not embraced, by the nation; after all, even if you disagree with such a “drastic” increase in emissions standards, the state of California had made its own decision on the matter. Unfortunately, those fair-whether environmental allies mentioned earlier have blocked the state’s right to self-determination and prevented it from passing the new standards at all. Namely, the Bush administration has ordered the EPA, the organization established to work as a force of environmental justice, to block California’s attempts to clean its airways at the behest of US automakers. The big auto companies fear that higher standards for their new cars would deal a fatal blow to a domestic industry already struggling to compete with Japanese and European firms; however, they somehow fail to realize that one of the major reasons for their plight lies with this sluggish advancement in technology they are trying so hard to maintain. As people increasingly look to smaller and more efficient foreign cars, the American automakers will continue to suffer if they fail to innovate in the future.

 

Critics of environmental causes tend to paint issues of conservation as cases wherein people attempt to put “the land” or some random endangered owl over the concerns of regular folks. However, cases like this highlight an important fact: the causes of the planet are also the causes of all of us living on it. We all stand to gain from the future of more efficient and clean cars; the only ones who stand to lose are the stagnant forces of corporate welfare and corruption championed by Bush and the auto executives.