It's 2:50 last Monday afternoon and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner is clutching her uneaten bagel lunch between her knees in the back of a sport-utility vehicle speeding toward Washington's Landing." So wrote a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter last month.
Environmental protection paying what it does, Ms. Browner is never going to have to worry about whether she can afford the comfort and safety of a sport-utility vehicle. But she could make it harder for the people who pay her salary to own one if EPA decides to implement nationwide a new and potentially costly California emissions standard intended to take the vehicles permanently "off-road."
That standard, approved by the California Air Resources Board Nov. 6, requires sport-utility vehicles to reduce emissions to the same level as cars by the year 2004. It's not clear the technology necessary to effect the change on bigger, heavier trucks -- and still enable them to tow and haul as before -- even exists. A spokesman for the board said it had tested a light truck using an "advanced catalytic converter" costing about $100 and met the standard. But the board hasn't exactly rushed into the manufacturing business to put the competition to shame. A Ford spokesman guessed the company might have to increase prices some $1,500 per vehicle, but other estimates are considerably higher.
To the extent that the price increase discourages people from buying bigger and safer vehicles, regulations that reduce emissions and that hypothetically protect human health could wind up contributing to premature human death -- not exactly a winning trade-off. Regulators may not wish away the laws of physics, no matter how hard they try.
More ironic still, the standard could hamper pollution-reduction efforts. The fact is that almost any 1998 model light truck or sport-utility vehicle produces fewer emissions of hydrocarbons, which contribute to smog, than almost any pre-1994 model year car. The same is true with respect to nitrogen oxides for all but the heaviest of the SUVs. If you wanted to clean the air, you would want the owner of the 1993 Ford Taurus to trade up to a 1998 Ford Explorer.
A 1992 National Academy of Sciences report made precisely that point: "Because the older vehicles in the fleet are in general the least fuel efficient and the most undesirable in terms of environmental pollution," it said, "incentives that inhibit vehicle turnover could delay the achievement of the objectives of the regulatory system." Anywhere but Washington and, apparently, Sacramento, higher prices count as disincentives.
Rather than getting cleaner, greener trucks off the road, regulators could go after the older, less-well-maintained cars producing most of the pollution. The technology to target those vehicles --known as remote sensing -- does exist and has proved itself in tests. But regulators themselves don't want to play the heavies here; that's a job for automobile manufacturers.
Meanwhile auto manufacturers have offered to meet California regulators more than half way, indeed 90 percent of the way in complying with the standard. But the board, chasing after those last few molecules of pollution, turned down the offer.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has referred to this chase as "tunnel vision" -- the single-minded pursuit of a single goal that becomes counterproductive. What could be more counterproductive to the health and safety of Americans than keeping them out of cleaner, safer trucks? Ms. Browner need never know, but consumers may find out the hard way.
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