Next week, the California Air Resources Board, or CARB -- the same agency that only five years ago gained notoriety for its role in "killing" the electric car -- could be in a position to deliver another crippling blow to the United States' effort to achieve energy independence.
As part of California's strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation fuels, CARB is pushing for the enactment of a low-carbon fuel standard, or LCFS, that aims to regulate the emissions level of petroleum refiners, biofuels producers and others that produce or import the transportation fuels used in California. The credit or penalty would be assessed according to both the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions associated with each of the steps in the fuel's life cycle, including production, transport and tailpipe emissions.
Such "cradle to grave" accounting sounds logical only if it allows all fuels to compete on an equal footing. But this is what the fuel standard in its current version fails to do.
At a time when the U.S. is charting its way out of its debilitating -- and growing -- oil dependence, CARB's plan puts biofuels at a comparative disadvantage against petroleum. It does so by requiring that indirect greenhouse gas-emitting activities, such as deforestation and plowing up grasslands -- which are often associated with increased use of biofuels -- be considered, while failing to account for indirect carbon-emitting activities related to petroleum production. CARB's explanation: "No other significant indirect effects that result in large greenhouse gas emissions have been identified."
That statement may be true for roughly half of California's oil, which is either drilled in the state or imported from Alaska, but certainly not for the half coming from distant places such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Colombia. Some of the direct carbon-intensive activities that CARB's staff prefer to ignore are: pumping seawater into the wells of Saudi Arabia to increase reservoir pressure, transporting the crude to processing facilities where sulfur and other impurities are removed, and powering a tanker during a long voyage across two oceans.
