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Fuel Fight: The Battle over Low-Carbon Fuel Standards
News Articles | The Wall Street Journal | August 31, 2009
Read the full article on the originating site
The Consumer Energy Alliance–made up of more than 100 groups including Exxon, BP, ConocoPhillips, Peabody, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce–today kicks off an ad campaign in a handful of states “to educate American consumers on economic and national security impacts associated with a national Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS).”
Low-carbon fuel standards would set new environmental rules for transportation fuel, by penalizing dirtier fuels—such as Canadian oil sands–in a bid to clean up the overall environmental picture of U.S. transportation.
The problem is, the Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House in June doesn’t include a low-carbon fuel provision; the draft version this spring did, but it was completely cut out during the summertime horse-trading in the House. And Waxman-Markey is considered the starting point for even greater compromises as the Senate tackles energy and climate legislation next month.
Sure, there are standalone low-carbon fuel bills in both the House and Senate, but neither has budged in their respective committees. And the Obama administration’s recent decision to greenlight new pipelines to carry crude from Canadian oil sands suggests that energy security outweighs many environmental considerations.
That’s not stopping the CEA, which warns that the new rules, “if enacted,” would “threaten American jobs, increase prices at the pump, and expand U.S. dependence on energy imports from unstable foreign regimes.”
The argument is that the low-carbon fuel rules would disproportionately hit Canadian oil imports, since most Canadian crude comes from oil sands which have a nastier environmental footprint than traditional crude. By blacklisting one of the key suppliers to the U.S., the new standard would force the U.S. to pay even more for fuel from less-friendly countries.
Plenty of folks, from the Congressional Research Service to independent consultants, agree that low-carbon rules would likely lead to more expensive fuel, simply because there’d be less “clean” oil to choose from.
In its ad campaign—initially targeted at Tennessee, Montana, and the Dakotas—the CEA says “Congress is set to consider” new rules that would “be disastrous.” Gasoline prices, the ads say, “would increase by at least 60 cents a gallon.”
Now that both sides in the energy and climate debate are openly cribbing from the lessons of the health-care scrum, expect temperatures to keep rising in September.
Tagged with: low carbon fuel standard, waxman-markey bill, consumer energy alliance
