Climate of Hope by Michael Bloomberg

Author:Michael Bloomberg [Bloomberg, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CARL POPE

10

OIL’S TWILIGHT

Oil dependence is a problem we need no longer have—and it’s cheaper not to. U.S. oil dependence can be eliminated by proven and attractive technologies that create wealth, enhance choice, and strengthen common security.

—AMORY LOVINS, HEAD OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE

In the spring of 1970, at the age of twenty-five, I returned from my work with the Peace Corps in India and became a newly fledged environmental lobbyist; almost immediately, I was assigned to work on the Clean Air Act. Getting ready required reading only one book, Vanishing Air, by one of Ralph Nader’s Raiders. The first Earth Day had just occurred, and environmental advocacy was still in its infancy.

Ten months earlier, the California state assembly had rejected by one vote a bill to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 1975, which would have been a truly revolutionary change in the future of the automobile. The auto manufacturers prevailed, arguing that they could not sell cars in California if they could not sell IC engines. Later they conceded that if the bill had passed, they would somehow have complied.

Our job was to make sure that similar arguments did not derail the thrust toward a major national cleanup of air pollution. A lead Senate sponsor of the Clean Air Act, Maine Democrat Ed Muskie, was backstopped by Delaware Republican Caleb Boggs. Muskie wanted to be president, so he was bold. President Nixon didn’t want Muskie to own the new, bipartisan anti-pollution issue—so the auto industry could not rely on the White House to weaken the bill.

Muskie put forth a proposal forcing the auto industry to devise new cleanup technologies and embed them in every car—a watered-down version of the California bill. The Big Three Detroit automakers sent their CEOs to Washington to explain to Muskie what could and could not be done. It backfired. Although Muskie made concessions to chemical plants and utilities through private lobbying, when confronted publicly by the auto industry, he hung tough.

I did not realize it, but California’s failure to ban internal combustion, combined with Muskie’s success in forcing Detroit to find and adopt new technology, would frame forty-five years of political combat over climate progress. Today, we are still fighting over the future of the combustion engine in transportation.

From 1970 until 2007, equipped with catalytic converters and other technology, internal combustion–powered cars and trucks got cleaner and cleaner. Engines also got more efficient. Instead of using this progress to reduce the amount of gasoline cars required (and wasted) however, the industry used this performance bonus to boost the acceleration (muscle) of ever-heavier cars.

California made another effort at moving beyond petroleum-powered transportation in the 1990s, establishing a mandate that first 2 percent, then 5 percent, and eventually 10 percent of car sales be “zero-emission vehicles” (ZEVs). The pushback was immediate and overwhelming. Resistance from auto companies and the oil industry, combined with legal victories by oil concerns, forced California to abandon the mandate and GM—controversially—to recall and scrap the entire fleet of its first-generation electric car, the Impact.

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