Greenhouse Gas Ruling Paves Way for EPA Limits

This story appears in the Dec. 14 print edition of Transport Topics.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week declared that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities are a danger to human health, a first step the agency must take along the path to regulations limiting the levels of combustion by-products from tailpipes.

While it was unclear how EPA’s “endangerment” finding might directly affect trucking, Glen Kedzie, vice president and environmental affairs counsel for American Trucking Associations, said regulation of truck greenhouse gas emissions is likely at some point.

“We do know this: Fuel economy standards are going to happen for our industry, regardless of the endangerment finding,” Kedzie said. “EPA is also working on approaches on how to establish a carbon metric and how to regulate carbon emissions from mobile sources.”

If congressional mandates are followed, a fuel efficiency or fuel economy rule could become effective for heavy trucking as soon as model year 2016, Kedzie said.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the endangerment finding at a Dec. 7 news conference, the same day that a world climate conference began in Copenhagen and at a time that climate change legislation is bogged down in Congress.

The House already has passed a cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions. However, if the Senate does not pass a climate change bill, the Obama administration made it clear it would move forward with its own regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Jackson said that scientific evidence convincingly shows that greenhouse gases are the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves and increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

“Business leaders, security experts, government officials, concerned citizens and the United States Supreme Court have called for enduring, pragmatic solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution that is causing climate change,” Jackson said.

EPA’s finding “continues our work towards clean energy reform that will cut greenhouse gases and reduce the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our national security and our economy,” Jackson said.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), co-author of the House climate change bill, said that the endangerment finding gave the United States credibility at the Copenhagen climate summit. “The world is watching, and the United States is acting,” Markey said.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), author of the Senate’s leading climate change legislation, said EPA’s endangerment finding “confirms what we have been told by America’s top scientists and leading scientists of the world — that unchecked global warming is perilous to human health and our environment.”

The EPA’s action was a response to a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that concluded the Clean Air Act required EPA to regulate greenhouse gases if the agency established that they harm public health.

The endangerment finding covers emissions of six key greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride.

“Today’s announcement, on its own, does not impose any new requirements on industry,” Jackson said. “But, today’s announcement is the prerequisite for strong new emissions standards for cars and trucks: the ones the president announced last spring.”

Although cars and light trucks are currently on EPA’s radar screen, that doesn’t mean the agency won’t get involved at a later date in also establishing economy standards for heavy trucks, Kedzie said.

Energy legislation passed in 2007 calls for the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to study the fuel efficiency of heavy trucks to determine the best test procedures and methods for measuring their fuel efficiency performance and factors that affect it.

The study, being done by the National Academy of Sciences for NHTSA, is due to be completed by March 2010.

“The study is not going to give a hard-core recommendation and say, ‘Thou shall do this,’ ” Kedzie said. “It’s going to be used by DOT and NHTSA when they proceed down the rulemaking path.”

“What the study is going to assess is the state of technology, what’s available today, what works and doesn’t work, and how well it works. This is a review of what the potential solutions can look like,” Kedzie added.

Adopting a heavy truck fuel efficiency rule would be at least a 24-month process after the study is completed, and probably would not take effect before 2016, Kedzie said.

Many efficiency issues, ranging from idling to combination vehicles, are being studied by NHTSA, Kedzie said.

“Would the improvements in fuel efficiency just be addressed by the manufacturers on the engine?” Kedzie asked. “Would they address the vehicle? Would it entail something to do with operations?”

“The big question is how is this efficiency rule going to look? No one knows,” Kedzie said. “There are a lot of ways; if, say, I have 10 gallons of fuel in my truck, how can I go the furthest?”