The Clean Car Peace Treaty - Here's Hoping

NPR’s online publication covered a story in April of this year about the “clean car peace treaty,” or CAFE standards on fuel standards, which are specifically intended to reduce green house gas emissions. While these standards have not been covered in the media nor further discussed by President Obama or his administration since their announcement in April, they are due to take effect in January of 2012 and are really a monumental step for the federal government to take being that the state of the environment and the issue of climate change have largely been under-prioritized in recent years. According to the article, “White House Issues New Gas Mileage Standards,” the standards were issued by a collaboration of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, which received remarkable cooperation from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in creating a single national fuel standard for vehicles. In addition to conserving an estimated 1.8 billion barrels of oil, the standards are also estimated to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by motor vehicles by almost a billion tons over the life of new models. Once the standards take effect in 2012, automakers are responsible for improving green house gas emissions and fuel economy by 5 percent each year.

 I think that while these new standards for car emissions are not going to have hugely dramatic effects on the United States’ carbon footprint, the notion of creating standards with the support of the industry responsible for ensuring those standards are met is a step in the right direction towards reducing that carbon footprint. As we’ve discussed in class, the “American lifestyle,” which since the birth of the auto industry has centered on the notion of a car for every nuclear family, is the most consumptive (and destructive) in the world. While reducing vehicular emissions and working toward “cleaner energy” will not necessarily rectify or reverse the overall negative impact that our American lifestyle has on this planet, in a decade where the environment is discussed so infrequently by politicians this “clean car peace treaty” holds at least the potential to pave the way for future standards on greenhouse gas emissions not only in the automobile industry but in other industries as well. I think it is an effective form of action because being that these standards were laid out and will be enforced by agencies of the federal government, they have real potential to bring about large-scale changes to our nation’s environmental impact. I think that the action is replicable in the sense that similar standards with plans to reduce emissions by a certain percentage each year could be applied to individual businesses themselves, especially with respect to factories and refineries, etc. This article does give me a bit of hope, especially after our class discussion on how the United States brought about the end to CFCs , that the United States could once again take an active role in the global effort to combat climate change.