Vehicles are now America’s biggest CO2
Early evening congestion on a Los Angeles freeway. Vehicle emissions are now the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the US. Some of the most common avatars of climate change — hulking power stations and billowing smokestacks — may need a slight update. For the first time in more than 40 years, the largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the US isn’t electricity production but transport — cars, trucks, planes, trains and shipping, theguardian.com wrote.
Emissions data has placed transport as the new king of climate-warming pollution at a time when the Trump administration is reviewing or tearing up regulations that would set tougher emissions standards for car and truck companies. Republicans in Congress are also pushing new fuel economy rules they say will lower costs for American drivers but could also weaken emissions standards.
Opponents of the administration fret this agenda will imperil public health and hinder the effort to address climate change.
“This Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t seem to have met an air regulation that it likes,” said Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board and a former EPA assistant administrator.
“I’ve not seen any evidence that this administration knows anything about the auto industry, they just seem to be against anything the Obama administration did.
“Vehicle emissions are going up, so clearly not enough is being done on that front. The Trump administration is halting further progress at a critical point when we really need to get a grip on this problem.”
The 1970 Clean Air Act, signed by (former US president) Richard Nixon, set standards for a cocktail of different pollutants emitted from new vehicles. New cars and trucks, which account for more than 80 percent of transport emissions, now have to meet fuel efficiency standards and display this information to consumers. This approach has helped cleanse previously smog-laden American cities and tamp down greenhouse gas emissions.
But in 2016, about 1.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions were emitted from transportation, up nearly two percent on the previous year — according to the Energy Information Administration. This increase means that transport has overtaken power generation as the most polluting sector in the country, and it’s likely to stay that way.
Cheap gasoline prices have led to a recent uptick in vehicle emissions, despite the fuel standards, at the same time that coal is being rapidly displaced by an abundance of cheap natural gas and the steady rise of renewable energy, driving a sharp decline in CO2 emissions from the power grid.
While coalminers have lost their jobs to technological advancement and environmental protesters have thrown their bodies in the path of oil pipelines, there has been far less to disrupt the basic emissions-emitting models of cars, trucks and planes.
Americans are buying larger cars and taking more flights — domestic aviation emissions grew 10 percent between 2012 and 2016 — and face little opposition in doing so.
“The change in power generation has been very impressive over the past 10 to 15 years,” said Brett Smith, assistant director of the Center for Automotive Research.
“In the automotive sector, there isn’t the same push. There are certainly Americans concerned about global warming but people are driving bigger and bigger vehicles each year. It’s not a priority for them. The cost of fuel is pretty cheap and at the moment there isn’t a better option out there than the internal combustion engine.”
Transport accounts for about a quarter of all US planet-warming emissions but also poses a direct health threat to about 45 million Americans who live, work or attend school within 300ft of roads that are shrouded in high air pollution levels.
This pollution can stunt lung growth, trigger asthma attacks, exacerbate heart disease and cause developmental problems. The EPA estimates 17,000 schools across the US are located next to roads with heavy traffic, with children from low-income and minority groups disproportionately put at risk. California is the only state in the US to ban the construction of a school on the cheap land found beside major highways.
US cities haven’t emulated the likes of London and Stockholm by charging drivers a congestion fee to coax them on to public transport, cycling or walking; nor does the US feature the comparatively high rates of fuel tax seen in Europe. France’s move to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 would be politically unthinkable in the States.
But the air is much cleaner in American cities than it was in the 1970s, and a world away