California’s Global Warming Leadership: A Win For Green Vehicles, Jobs and Oil Independence

By Bill Haller, Sierra Club California Activist

On April 1st the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in cooperation with the California Air Resources Board will release the first-ever national greenhouse gas standards for passenger vehicles. If you’re still waking up to the first few sips of your morning coffee, you may want to read that first sentence over again.

It boggles the mind. To cut greenhouse gases, create real jobs, reduce our oil dependency and in the process, better secure our nation, the Obama administration, U.S. EPA, the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration and Cal EPA through CARB put their heads together to come up with new standards for auto emissions for 2016 and beyond.

Me, I’m flabbergasted because for the last two decades the needle has barely moved on national fuel efficiency standards. Now it’s going to be set at 35 mpg. Somebody pinch me.

As a 52 year-old dad of two young kids (Little League for him, ballet and tap for her), a consumer (18 mpg when we roll the family van in neutral down a hill) and a Sierra Club volunteer (one of 150,000 treehuggers in California), I want to have the option to purchase a greener vehicle like a plug in hybrid or a battery electric vehicle. But what I really want is a cleaner, greener and more prosperous future for my kids. I know it sounds weird for me to say, but thanks to my government, that future is now more a reality than ever before. Oh, c’mon, you knew Detroit and Big Oil were never going to do it on their own.

Getting rid of harmful greenhouse gases is not only good for our environment but it also guarantees that all Americans benefit from clean breathable air including our elderly, the infirm, you, me, the kids. We save money at the gas pump, reduce our dangerous dependence on oil, create new jobs and ensure California’s global leadership in advancing technology for greener vehicles. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, passenger vehicles are responsible for over 70 percent of greenhouse gas pollution in our state. With about 30 million cars tooling around California’s freeways every day, that is why these new federal standards for greener vehicles are so important.

Happy? Me too.

California Leaders Oppose Drilling

California lawmakers have taken a strong stand against an oil industry “culture of corruption” that threatens our coasts.
Assemblymember Pedro Nava and has authored a resolution opposing drilling for oil along California’s coastline. The resolution, which was just approved by our California Legislature, will demonstrate our state’s continued resistance to coastal drilling.

The resolution has become even more important in light of recent news that oil regulators with the U.S. Minerals Management Service have become industry’s lap dogs, not watchdogs (AP).

Not only would new drilling place our precious coasts in the hands of this rogue agency, drilling won’t pay off for more than a decade, the representatives said. Furthermore, it would endanger our state’s $12.5 billion coastal tourism industry and our fishing and aquaculture businesses, Assemblymember Nava explained.

We can reverse our dependence on foreign oil without drilling, Sierra Club California Director Bill Magavern pointed out at today’s press conference. More efficient vehicle efficiency standards, such as California’s Clean Cars Law, would save millions of gallons of oil simply by putting existing technologies to good use. But the Bush Administration continues to stand in the way of this law.

“More offshore drilling is an illusion, not a solution,” said Bill Magavern. “California is trying to lead the way – we just need the U.S. EPA to get out of the way.”

Assemblymember Jared Huffman, Natural Resources Defense Council’s Victoria Rome and Environment California’s Bernadette Del Chiaro also stood against coastal drilling.

Ending The Oil Addiction

Sierra Club California Director Bill Magavern just debated Republican Congressman Dan Lungren over offshore oil drilling.

One of Bill's best points:

"We can't address our smoking problem by looking for new sources of tobacco, and we can't address our oil addiction by drilling off our beautiful coasts. Instead, we need to use less oil, and to find alternatives to oil. That will bring the price down, and, more importantly, wean us off our addiction to oil."

More reasons NOT to drill for oil off California's coasts:

• Drilling our coasts would do nothing to reduce gas prices for the average American family. Opening offshore areas to drilling would only lower gas prices by less than 3-4 cents a gallon, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

• Drilling isn't a good, quick fix. It would take at least a decade to bring new leases issued under this plan into production.

• Oil companies are not even using 5,500 offshore leases they already own.

• The honest answer to our oil problem is to use less of it, and that means better, faster fuel economy standards and a shift toward renewable energy. Renewable sources of energy remain a promising path away from our oil dependency, both Bill Magavern and Dan Lungren agreed during their ABC News debate.

Find out more about the "Outer Continental Shelf," the area that would be affected by drilling.

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