Will Highly Anticipated California Climate Plan Backfire?

March 2, 2009 – The New Fuels Alliance (NFA), one of the nation’s leading advocates for advanced biofuels, is warning that California’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions from gasoline may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions and worsen the state’s dependence on dirty fossil fuels.

Biofuels are being wrongly penalized by the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) which requires oil companies to reduce the carbon sold in their fuels by 10 percent by 2020. Under this proposal, all fuels are assigned a “carbon score” to reward the least carbon intensive fuels. But only biofuel is being singled out for so-called “indirect effects” thereby giving petroleum products a better carbon score and a competitive advantage. For drivers in California, it means they will be buying more dirty petroleum products and less of the cleaner renewable fuels.

“This proposal encourages oil companies to sell dirty fossil fuels like Canadian tar sands instead of renewable fuels including advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol,” said Brooke Coleman, head of the New Fuels Alliance. “Ironically, CARB’s proposal to reduce carbon will just result in more carbon in our environment.”

Even more alarming to the Alliance, CARB’s proposal puts up serious roadblocks to the development of more advanced biofuels from green sources like switchgrass. “These regulations will stifle advanced biofuels investment and derail the industry. California is moving the opposite direction of President Obama who stated in a recent speech it is critical to support advanced biofuels.”

Over 100 of the nation’s top scientists are also questioning CARB’s plan. In a letter sent to Governor Schwarzenegger, the scientists warned that: “this proposal creates an asymmetry or bias in a regulation designed to create a level playing field. It violates the fundamental presumption that all fuels in a performance-based standard should be judged the same way …Enforcing different compliance metrics against different fuels is the equivalent of picking winners and losers, which is in direct conflict with the ambition of the LCFS.” Click here to see the letter signed by 111 scientists from research labs such as the National Academy of Sciences, UC-Berkeley, Sandia National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and MIT.

Go here to see the letter: http://www.arb.ca.gov/lists/lcfs-general-ws/28-phd_lcfs_mar09.pdf

CARB is scheduled to make their decision public in the next few days, and then there will be a public comment period before their decision is made final between April 23rd and 24th.