California took aim Thursday at the oil industry and its impact on global warming, adopting the world's first regulation to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel that runs cars and trucks.
The Air Resources Board voted 9 to 1 in favor of the complex new rule, which is expected to slash the state's gasoline consumption by a quarter in the next decade. It seeks to expand the market for electric and hydrogen-fueled vehicles and jump-start a host of futuristic biofuels to replace corn-based ethanol, as well as oil.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praised the "first-in-the-world low carbon fuel standard," noting that 16 other states are looking to California as a model and that President Obama has called for a national standard.
It will "not only reduce global warming," he said, "it will reward innovation, expand consumer choice and encourage the private investment we need to transform our energy infrastructure."
The regulation requires producers, refiners and importers of gasoline and diesel to reduce the carbon footprint of their fuel by 10% over the next decade. And it launches the state on an ambitious path toward ratcheting down its overall heat-trapping emissions by 80% by mid-century -- a level that some scientists deem necessary to avoid drastic global climate disruption.
Experts say California faces droughts, fresh water shortages, rising sea levels and widespread extinction of plants and wildlife species from growing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.
Scores of industry executives and environmental activists testified on the hotly debated fuel regulation at a daylong public hearing in Sacramento before the vote. Corn ethanol producers complained that the rule unfairly exaggerated the effects of using food crops for energy. Cattlemen argued that diverting corn to ethanol has upped their feed costs.
Canada's consul general in San Francisco charged that the rule discriminates against oil from Alberta tar sands. And former Gen. Wesley Clark, testifying for the ethanol industry, said the board failed to account for carbon-intensive effects of U.S. military forces protecting oil reserves in the Middle East.
The regulation calculates the life cycle of fuels from their extraction -- or cultivation, in the case of biofuels -- to their combustion. But the indirect effect of replacing cropland used for energy will also be included, and the board's calculations of those land-use effects is strongly disputed by corn ethanol producers.
