The California Air Resources Board has unanimously approved sweeping new rules designed to facilitate the transition from gasoline-powered to electric and hydrogen-powered cars. By 2025, automakers are now required to produce 1.4 million “zero-emission” vehicles for the California market, a number that would make clean cars 15 percent of  all new car and truck sales.

Josh Cassidy

A Nissan all-electric Leaf in San Francisco.

The rules also require automakers, by 2025, to halve greenhouse gas emissions emanating from vehicle tailpipes, compared to current levels. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is considering similar emissions rules, as well as a new fuel economy standard of 54.5 mpg by 2025.

State regulators hope the new rules will lead to the widespread adoption of zero-emission vehicles, which they say is critical for meeting California’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. That goal was established by executive order by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger, and goes beyond the cuts mandated by California’s landmark  global warming law, AB 32.

According to the board’s calculations, zero-emission vehicles will have to make up nearly 100% of new car sales in 2040 and beyond to meet that goal. “Without [the transition from gasoline to clean cars], which may appear to be radical to people, you cannot lower CO2 emissions enough to stop the global climate change that’s occurring,” says Tom Cackette of the Air Resources Board.

The Air Resources Board estimates that the new rules will raise the average sticker price on 2025 model year cars by $1900. However, the board says, the savings in fuel costs over the life of the car will be three times that.

The new rules announced today include the following:

• Greenhouse gas emissions cuts
  The rules cut greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes 47% by 2025 compared to today’s new cars.
• Cuts in smog-forming emissions
  Today’s cars are 99% cleaner than cars were in the 1960s. But the new rules reduce smog-forming emissions from tailpipes a further 75% by 2025.
• Zero-emission vehicle mandate
  Beginning in 2018, automakers must sell increasing numbers of electric cars, hydrogen fuel-cell cars or other cars emitting little to no pollution. By 2025, zero-emission vehicles must make up 15% of new car sales. In the early years of the program, car companies can get credit for plug-in hybrid car sales or for going above and beyond requirements of the greenhouse gas rule.
• Hydrogen Fuel Stations
  The rules would require gas stations to install hydrogen fueling pumps based on the number of hydrogen fuel-cell cars in the state. The oil companies are negotiating with ARB on a Memorandum of Agreement that would allow them to avoid regulation if they build hydrogen stations with government or private funding.

As for the response from the car industry, at a public meeting this week automakers asked for maximum flexibility in meeting the new sales mandate. They say success will ultimately depend on consumer adoption of the new technology, which includes cars like the all-electric Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. Of the 10,000 Leafs sold in the US, almost 4,500 of them were sold in California.

“It’s a long, long bridge between here and 2025 to grow 15 percent of the market on a car that’s not price competitive, on a car that’s not performance competitive, on a car that will inevitably have infrastructure issues,” says Bill Reinert with Toyota’s Advanced Technology Group.

The board didn’t address electric charging infrastructure in these rules, but has committed to looking at the issue in 2014. Currently, there are about 1,200 public charging stations in California and funding exists for  several thousand more. Since electric vehicle owners charge their cars predominantly at home, regulators say they aren’t sure how many public charging stations will be needed.

The Air Resources Board says it’s committed to continuing financial incentives for advanced vehicles, though the program has proven so popular that they have been reduced. Today, consumers can get a $2500 rebate for purchasing a zero-emission vehicle and $1500 for a plug-in hybrid, down from $5000 originally. “We can’t give an assurance that [the funding] will last through the year, so we’re looking at other alternatives,” says Tom Cackette of ARB. (For more on what it’s like to buy and drive an electric car, check out QUEST’s blog series Life with the Leaf).

More from CARB:

• California’s Advanced clean cars program
• Fact sheet

Craig Miller/KQED

California's new emission standards would mandate a 15% increase in zero-emission-vehicles by 2025.

UPDATE: Today, California air regulators approved a package of “Clean Car” standards that many are calling historic. But there’s nothing new about that. California’s been out front in the clean car derby for decades.

In her recent story on QUEST, Lauren Sommer unpacks the proposed emissions standards. As part of her reporting she spoke with Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis, and a member of California’s Air Resources Board. Sperling puts the state’s new emissions standards in historical perspective, arguing that since the 1960s virtually all innovation in automotive emissions controls can be traced back to California. Here’s a snippet of Sommer’s conversation with Sperling.

Can you characterize the impact that California has had on the cars that we drive today?

Every car in the world is much cleaner-burning than cars before California’s regulations were put in place beginning in the 1960s. All of them have emission control technology that can really trace their history back to California.

California has had a big impact in two ways. One is through its air quality regulation, it has resulted in vehicles being much more clean-burning than they would have been otherwise. The other thing it did is through the zero-emission-vehicle mandate, even though the targets have not been met, it motivated car companies to be thinking about how can they use electric drive technologies. And so the Prius, for instance, was a direct response by Toyota to the reality that the future was going to be more electric.

We’re looking at almost a million-and-a-half zero-emission-vehicles on the road by 2025. How can a state mandate something to actually get these cars on the road?

The state says that if a car company wants to sell cars in the state, then a certain number of them must be zero-emission-vehicles (ZEV). It has led a tortured life. There’s been many changes along the way, lawsuits. But where we’ve ended up now is a rule that requires the car companies to produce 15% of the vehicles by 2025. And basically it’s a rule that if they want to do business in California, this is a requirement.

And is that something they’re happy about?

Well, remarkably they aren’t complaining about the numbers or the requirements. Basically the automobile industry is supportive of this new zero-emission-vehicle mandate. We’ve come a long ways. This is the industry that used to say it couldn’t do anything. It couldn’t do air bags; it couldn’t do air pollution regulations. Everything was too expensive, too difficult. They couldn’t improve fuel efficiency. And now, the industry is supporting all of these initiatives that California is taking. Some of them are national, but California is going further. I’d say there is much more of a partnership now between the auto industry and Air Resources Board than there was in the past.

California has always taken a sort of technology-forcing approach to regulation. Have we seen that work? And what’s the idea behind that?

The theory being the zero-emission-vehicle mandate is a policy to essentially just kick-start — jump-start the technology, get it going. The problem is that there is this tremendous inertia in the system and you can think about electric vehicles as being a disruptive technology. It’s a whole new way. It’s new supplier companies they need. They need new expertise. And so the role of the ZEV mandate is to just get us over the the hump. And then we use performance based standards and other kinds of policies that are more balanced and can be used to provide the incentives and the signals to the industry to move forward.

Many times when government tries to do this it doesn’t work out well, but many times it does. And I think what you need are good, smart, well informed regulators that are flexible. Everyone acknowledges we need to go to new technologies and it’s a big challenge on how to develop the policies that will lead us to this sustainable future.

With AB 32 the state has some very aggressive goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Is this stringent enough, in your opinion, to get the state where it needs to be?

Craig Miller/KQED

Transportation accounts for 40% of California's greenhouse gases.

Well the problem of oil and greenhouse gases is not really a California problem, it’s a global problem. So what California’s really doing with its climate policies generally, with the zero-emission-vehicle program, with the vehicle greenhouse gas standards…is creating a model for the rest of the country and the rest of the world. We are making a great effort to design the zero-emission-vehicle program…in such a way that they are easily replicated and easily coordinated by other states and by the federal government.

I was surprised to see hydrogen fueling stations in there. Obviously Governor Schwarzenegger was a huge proponent of the “hydrogen highway,” but is that still kicking around as one of the viable technologies we are going to see in the future?

Whenever we do analyses of the transportation sector and we say how do we get large reductions in oil use, how do we get large reductions in greenhouse gases, we always come back to the observation, the conclusion that we need fuel cell vehicles operating on hydrogen. It’s very difficult to imagine a future in which there is a dramatic reduction in oil use and greenhouse gases without hydrogen vehicles.

It’s possible we could have a future where there’s plug-in hybrid vehicles running on electricity and some of them on pure electricity, some with little combustion engines that are using low-carbon biofuels, maybe a little natural gas. That’s possible, but there are a lot of continuing issues with batteries, and fuel cells seem to be a more flexible, a potentially less expensive technology, that provides more utility to the consumer because we won’t have the range problems we have with electric vehicles. So in California, at ARB, in the analysis we’ve done for 2025 and 2050, fuel cell vehicles just play a huge role in that. So, many of us are convinced that fuel cells are going to be an important part of the future.

Mark Blinch / Reuters

The new fuel economy standard gives automakers credits for using electric power and cleaner air conditioning systems.

Gasoline prices hit record highs in 2011 and for the first time last year, the cost of gas equaled or exceeded even the cost of owning a vehicle: on average, the roughly $2,800 dollars that a household spent at the pump was more than a year’s worth of car payments.

Crunching the numbers on a hypothetical new car purchase 13 years from now, the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) says what we’ll save in gas will more than cover the extra spent on new fuel-saving technologies — an $800 savings even at the end of a five-year loan.

What’s  different about this new fleet standard standard — 54.5 MPG by 2025, proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and California’s Air Resources Board (ARB) — is what it means for the auto makers as well. Cooper says that by setting the standard far enough in the future, it gives car makers a reliable goal and enough time to work things out.

And it’s an “attribute-based” approach: it doesn’t tell carmakers to build smaller vehicles or different types of vehicles (like electric or alt-fuels), it just mandates the mileage standard itself and allows the manufacturers to come up with an individualized mix of vehicles and features to accomplish it. This is part of the reason you’re seeing more large hybrid SUV’s on the road, and why one of the most touted vehicles at the Detroit Auto Show this week was a V6 “eco-boost” Ford F-150 truck. The first five pages of this report from the Congressional Research Service has a good explanation and the back story.

The automakers get credits or allowances for attributes like electric power and cleaner air conditioning systems, so that 54.5 number works out to just under 40 MPG across a given manufacturer’s fleet. But CFA’s Cooper acknowledges that and still sees the new standard as “a landmark in U.S. Energy policy. They will be making fewer trips to the gas station when they get these vehicles,” he told reporters in a conference call today.

Now I’m just waiting to hear about the woman suing Honda in Small Claims Court down here in Torrance, California. She claims the automaker told her that the hybrid Civic she bought would get 50 miles per gallon. Not so, says the woman. An L.A. County Superior Court judge wants more info. Stay tuned.

Reed Galin / Lone Tree Productions

Updated Monday, November 28, 2011

For California Air Resources Board (ARB) chair Mary Nichols, pre-Thanksgiving prep meant responding to list of requests from Orange County Republican congressman Darrell Issa and his House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

As part of its expanding probe into how the newest Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards were set, the letter asked for information about how California came up with its vehicle emissions standards and what role state officials played in developing the newly announced federal fuel economy standard.

According to documents released by the Air Board just before the holiday, Issa’s letter includes charges that the state of California is “de facto,” setting fuel economy standards, a job legally left to the feds.

In her response, Nichols twice asserts that California is not setting fuel economy standards but has set emission standards, an authority reaffirmed by federal court decisions and supported in the Clean Air Act, which allows states to seek waivers to enact its own pollution standards. “Every federal court that has heard this misguided preemption mantra has soundly dismissed it,” wrote Nichols.

Issa presses the point further by asking Nichols whether she believes that “greenhouse gas regulation is ‘related to’ fuel economy standards.” Nichols calls the claim “a legalistic contortion that defies common sense,” and counters that were that true, “states could not regulate speed limits because such are clearly closely ‘related to’ fuel economy.”

In his letter, Issa mentions that Nichols declined to appear for an October committee hearing and did not offer an alternative person.  Issa said this was “emblematic” of a concern that ARB is “unresponsive” and “unappreciative of congressional priorities,” and he was expanding his investigation because of it.

One of Issa’s 18 queries came startlingly close to the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” category. One asks, “Do you believe that a closed and secretive process is the best approach for regulating an industry that affects nearly every American?” Nichols responds that ARB’s processes are “thorough, transparent and open.” She also notes that it is “standard practice” to confer with overlapping agencies, stakeholder groups and “potentially regulated parties before launching a formal rule-making process.”

Issa mentions a New York Times article that quoted Nichols as saying, “We put nothing in writing, ever.”  The 2009 article Issa quotes is talking about the private conversations between Nichols, presidential energy advisor Carol Browner and auto industry officials. Browner set those talks in motion to work toward a compromise on a single national standard, one that was indeed announced later. Issa skipped over the rest of Nichols’ quote, which read: “…that was one of the ways we made sure that everyone’s ability to talk freely was protected.”

In response to Issa’s request for all ARB communications with federal agencies and automakers about the agency’s involvement in fuel economy standard talks for model years 2012 through 2016, Nichols writes that there were none, since ARB does not set fuel standards. At one point Nichols calls some of Issa’s requests for documentation “unduly broad and overly burdensome” and “declines to produce manufacturers’ confidential business information or other privileged information.” In addition to responses to the committee’s queries, Nichols’ staff included nearly 20 pages of supporting documentation.

Issa is on record supporting alternative fuels, saying the country should ”encourage the development of zero-emission clean energy generation, such as nuclear, hydro-electricity, wind, solar, all of which can meet our energy needs now and replace older and dirtier fossil fuel generation.” He supports increasing fuel efficiency standards and also increasing domestic fossil fuel production, including opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, the outer continental shelf and western states’ oil shale assets. He also states on his website that Congress must maintain “strong oversight” over the agencies that regulate the energy industry.

In fact, last month the federal EPA’s new director for San Francisco-based Region 9 made an astonishing claim on KQED’s Forum program. Jared Blumenfeld said that more Californians die from air pollution than from car wrecks. When a caller asked him to back up the claim, Blumenfeld provided the following statistics:

- Traffic-related fatalities: 3,949 deaths per year from 3,535 fatal collisions (average for 1999-2008)
- Deaths associated with PM2.5 exposure above 5 ug/m3 in California : 18,000 deaths per year

Cars are doing double duty in these statistics, since passenger vehicles are a large source of air pollution. Over the decades the state has addressed this fact with landmark efforts to regulate vehicle emissions, in efforts initially to improve local air quality and more recently, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In a new study released this week by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC),  researchers looked at two state priorities: reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and improving air quality to benefit public health, and evaluated the effectiveness of four potential transportation strategies to address both.

What they found is something that policymakers have known all along: there are no easy answers.  And everything involves a trade-off.

PPIC research fellow Louise Bedworth compared the cost, public health benefits, and GHG reduction potential for various alternative-fuel vehicles; battery-electrics, fuel cell, ethanol, and for reducing overall vehicle miles.  What she found is that transforming California’s vehicle fleet to battery-electric vehicles provides the greatest public health benefit, but that high costs and technological uncertainty make this option far from ideal.

On the flip side, said Bedsworth, while we have the technology for vehicles to run on corn-based ethanol, research shows that when indirect land-use costs are considered, corn-based biofuels provide no significant public health or climate change benefit.

But while the PPIC looks at local health and global warming effects separately, a new study out of Stanford has found that the two are directly linked. It’s well established that carbon dioxide contributes to global warming and that increased temperatures can exacerbate air pollution, but the new study shows that CO2 “domes” that develop over urban areas are, in fact, causing health problems for city-dwellers.  The study, conducted by civil and environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobsen, looked at models for the contiguous 48 states, for California and for the Los Angeles area. Results showed an increased death rate in all three areas compared to what the rate would be if no local carbon dioxide were being emitted.

Neither current regulations, nor the federal cap-and-trade bill passed by the House address the local effects of CO2 emissions on health.  Jacobsen says that this study provides evidence that they should.  He estimated an increase in premature mortality of 50-to-100 deaths per year from local CO2 emissions in California.

Jacobsen talks about his study in the video, below.