Greens Not Happy About EPA Guidelines

New fuel-economy rules proposed by the federal Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency are the first major move by the U.S. toward cracking down on greenhouse-gas emissions. The proposed program includes miles-per-gallon requirements and national emissions standards under the EPA’s greenhouse-gas-emissions guidelines for model years from 2012 to 2016.

You’d think that environmental groups would be overjoyed.

Hardly. What has them worried are all the pro-industry rule tweaks and what they see as slanted calculations. “Automakers lobbied hard to include loopholes in the Administration’s proposal,” says Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign at the Center for Auto Safety.

One such wrinkle: in a key concession to manufacturers, the Department of Transportation offers generous credits to carmakers that build advanced-technology vehicles. Manufacturers of electric vehicles will get credits that apply to the regulation’s overall company pollution targets. However, the power-plant carbon emissions from generating the electricity to run an EV are not factored into the greenhouse-gas calculations for such vehicles, says Jim Kliesch, senior engineer with the

Union

of Concerned Scientists. “In truth, if you include system-wide emissions it’s about half of what a conventional vehicle emits,” he says.

Time