The Politics of Green

Environmental and energy issues are hot topics on Capitol Hill. What they'll mean for trucking is anyone's guess. But you can count on one thing: They will have an effect.

Deborah Lockridge • Senior Editor

There are various proposals and various bills that are circulating on both the House and the Senate side, it seems on almost a weekly basis," that deal with the environment and energy conservation, says Glen Kedzie, American Trucking Associations vice president of environmental affairs.

"If you look at the bills and amendments and committee recommendations, this is a hot topic in Washington, and frankly, nobody can really predict what's going to happen when."

Energy legislation and climate change legislation are both being debated separately, Kedzie says, but they can't help but affect each other. "Which is the more pressing issue for the nation and the world? Is it to reduce carbon, or is it to be independent from foreign sources of oil?"

Those two goals are not always compatible, he notes. For instance, coal-to-liquid technology being pushed in Congress would limit dependence on foreign oil. But unless some advanced technologies are used to keep carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from being released during the process, it will mean more greenhouse gases – a larger "carbon footprint" that contributes to global warming.

At press time, trucking lobbyists had managed to get the Senate to drop a proposal that would have imposed fuel-economy, or CAFE, standards on heavy-duty trucks (see story on page 62). Instead, the bill would give the Departments of Energy and Transportation and the EPA 18 months to come up with a way to measure efficiency in on-highway trucks, and then propose a rule to require improvement.

When it comes to global warming, one popular concept being bandied about is a "carbon tax." But exactly what form a carbon tax may take is very much up in the air.

Theoretically, a carbon tax would be paid whenever a molecule of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. But how exactly do you implement a carbon tax? Some talk about a carbon tax that would affect corporations, and big emitters such as power utilities, but this of course would end up being passed on to consumers. The idea is that raising the price of energy would reduce energy use, and therefore reduce CO 2 emissions.

Another way to impose a carbon tax is to do it at the fuel pump – at a time when even the trucking industry is saying we already need higher fuel taxes to pay for infrastructure repair and improvement.

Taxing the carbon content of fuels is considered a political impossibility by many. Many proponents of a carbon tax advocate a "revenue-neutral" carbon tax, where other taxes, such as payroll taxes, would be cut, or taxpayers would get some sort of rebate, to offset the additional carbon tax.

"Everybody's talking about carbon trading, taxing, capping," says Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum. "Until you figure out how to measure this stuff, why in the world would you start putting arbitrary limits and numbers out there? Unfortunately it's the result of a lot of pent-up frustration by a lot of members of Congress and a particular dislike of this administration's handling of this kind of thing. It's really misguided. It's saying you have to meet a number before you know how to measure what goes into that number."

Ironically, the clean air regulations that the industry has been dealing with may be at odds with goals of reducing the industry's "carbon footprint" – the amount of greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere that are believed to contribute to global warming. That's because fuel efficiency may drop on the new low-emissions engines, meaning more fuel is burned, and therefore more greenhouses gases, while putting out less pollution.

"So now it's like, 'Oh no, we were cleaning up our nation's air but we were also melting icebergs," Kedzie says. "I don't think they ever envisioned the impacts they would have on energy independence or greenhouse gases when they passed the Clean Air Act. Never did you read anything about carbon output, anything about energy independence (in the clean air regulations). Every other word was PM, NOx, ozone, smog, health effects. Now every other word (on Capitol Hill) is efficiency, energy independence, reducing your carbon footprint."

On the energy independence front, a favorite topic is renewable fuels. Yet while biodiesel may reduce our dependence on foreign oil, the fact that it contains less energy than regular diesel means more fuel must be used. Therefore more greenhouse gases are put into the air. And, Kedzie notes, do we risk trading one energy dependence for another? If subsidies for such fuels go away, the price would dramatically increase. If drought or pestilence affects the output of the crops used to create biodiesel, we might end up relying on importation of biofuel feedstocks instead of importation of foreign oil.

Even if new regulations aimed at global warming or energy independence don't affect trucking directly, there will likely be indirect effects.

For instance, let's say global warming legislation targets power plants instead, perhaps with a carbon tax on the power plant emissions. "That in turn is going to increase the cost of energy production, which will be passed along as much as possible to the consumer," Kedzie says. "With respect to trucking, everything that goes on a truck requires energy to produce – steel, rubber, paint, fuel.

"Even though you might not see a regulation being imposed directly on top of the trucking industry, don't think that the trucking industry will not be impacted. There will be indirect costs, and they will be high indirect costs."

No matter how it happens, he says, "the face of the trucking industry is going to be forever changed as a result of what's happening on these two fronts – energy conservation or energy independence, and reducing greenhouse gases."