Green Jersey

Obama announces plan for cleaner vehicles

President Obama yesterday announced a new gas mileage standard for cars and trucks, a plan that will mean a substantial reduction in global warming pollution from vehicles. The program was quickly embraced by environmentalists and the auto industry.

Vehicles will have to get 35.5 miles per gallon, on average, by 2016. (The current national standard for cars: A little above 25 miles per gallon.) The result will be about a third fewer carbon emissions from the vehicles.

California had tried to set its own standards for cleaner vehicles, and a group of states including New Jersey had pledged to do the same, but states’ efforts were blocked by the Bush administration. The Obama administration had faced a looming deadline to decide whether to allow California to adopt its rules.

This new federal standard is very similar to rules California and New Jersey proposed — but better because it covers all 50 states, Matt Elliott, the global warming and clean energy advocate for Environment New Jersey, told Green Jersey yesterday.

“It totally makes sense to do one uniform, federal standard,” Elliott said. “Like with so many other things — RGGI (the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative), clean energy investments, et cetera — the states got fed up waiting for the federal government to do anything and so set out on their own to show what could be done with some real political leadership.

“I think that if New Jersey and California and the 12 other states hadn’t already enacted the policy, Obama would likely not have done this so quickly. So I’d say all the work we did to pass this thing in New Jersey and other states paid off in a big way.”

The White House says its program will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of vehicles and reduce global warming pollution by 900 million metric tons — the equivalent of removing 177 million of today’s cars from the roads over the next six and a half years.

It will also cost consumers about $1,300 more per vehicle up front — but that would take only three years to recoup, and the car would save about $2,800 over its life in better gas mileage, Obama has said.

“The future of the auto industry lies in making cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles that reduce global warming pollution and our dependence on oil,” Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement on the organization’s website. “These new national rules build on California’s ground-breaking standards to tackle global warming pollution from cars and trucks. Starting in model year 2012, the new standards will deliver cleaner, higher-mileage cars nationwide, cut global warming pollution, and save drivers money every time they fill up.”