The New Fuels Alliance (NFA) issued a news release today to make public a letter that warns California's efforts to reduce carbon emissions from gasoline may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions and worsen the state's dependence on dirty fossil fuels.
The said biofuels are being wrongly penalized by the California Air Resources Board's (CARB) Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), which requires oil companies to reduce the carbon sold in their fuels 10 percent by 2020.
Under the proposal, all fuels are assigned a "carbon score" to reward the least carbon intensive fuels. Only biofuels are being singled out for so-called "indirect effects" thereby giving petroleum products a better carbon score and a competitive advantage. For drivers in California, it means they will be buying more dirty petroleum products and less of the cleaner renewable fuels, the release said.
"This proposal encourages oil companies to sell dirty fossil fuels like Canadian tar sands instead of renewable fuels including advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol," said Brooke Coleman, head of the New Fuels Alliance. "Ironically, CARB's proposal to reduce carbon will just result in more carbon in our environment."
In a letter sent to California Governor Schwarzenegger, a group of 111 scientists warned that: "this proposal creates an asymmetry or bias in a regulation designed to create a level playing field. It violates the fundamental presumption that all fuels in a performance-based standard should be judged the same way ...Enforcing different compliance metrics against different fuels is the equivalent of picking winners and losers, which is in direct conflict with the ambition of the LCFS."
Click here to see the letter (.pdf) signed by 111 scientists from research labs such as the National Academy of Sciences, UC-Berkeley, Sandia National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and MIT.
The Alliance, along with a group of companies, sent a letter with its concerns to CARB last fall. Check it out at the group's website.
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