My name is Ernest Earnest and I think we can address the problem of energy and environment by doing this:
We need to develop a strategy to review and prioritize our environmental standards based on trade offs between air quality, green house gas emissions, and economic impacts or benefits. Some technological solutions can provide benifit in all three areas, but many times, what benifits one objective detracts from another.
Congress tends to address one environmental/energy issue at a time without any standard to to balance the impacts/benefits between the three parameters.
As an example of an issue where priorities between air quality, energy independence, and climate change need to be evaluated, consider our need to shift to more fuel efficient vehicles.
We all know that, in order to achieve energy independence and meet our global obligations to reduce greenhouse gases, we must change our driving habits to embrace small fuel efficient vehicles. The Europeans and Asian counties are already way ahead in this regard. The fleet average fuel economy in Europe is already better than our congressionaly mandated CAFE standards for any time in the future.
The most fuel efficient vehicles sold in Europe cannot be imported to this county because their emission and safety standards are different than ours. Ford sells a car in Europe that gets 65mpg, but we can not import it. Over 50% of new cars sold in Europe are diesel, but our emission standards are different so only a few are available here.
Our long term goal should be to reconcile the differences between European and US standards. If we were to accommodate the current European standards on a temporary basis to allow importation of the most fuel efficient vehicles now, it would, not only speed up our move toward energy independence, but allow US manufacturers to develop “world cars” that could be sold anywhere thus improving our export market.
Adopting such a strategy, might have a small negative impact on air quality, but how do we evaluate that relative to our goal of energy independence and mitigating climate change. But, how do we decide how to balance? we need trade off standards. Any ideas?
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