One of the speakers in favor of the bill was Jack Darin, Illinois Director of the Sierra Club, who chaired a working group appointed by the Governor which is making the reccomendation to adopt the California standards.
Automobiles are the second largest source of pollutants that cause global warming after coal power plants. The California standards would reduce those emissions as well as other pollutants that cause asthma and other health problems. Its expected that much of the reduction would come through increased fuel efficiency, which means car buyers will spend less on gas.
The automobile manufacturers brought in some of their big guns from California, D.C. and Chicago to lobby against the bill. Their main spokesperson was the ironically named Steven Douglas (we were short distance from the Stephen A. Douglas statue on the Capitol lawn) from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The Alliance is a joint project of the major car manufactures and they send Steven from California to all over the country to lobby against government interference in their right to pollute the planet we all live on.
I thought Steve was mostly full of crap but never more so than on his points about consumer choice and electric cars. Perhaps most annoyingly, he made some ridiculous statements about the high cost of electric cars and their limited driving range. Having just watched the documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car, I know that the technology exists to make affordable zero emissions electric cars that have a reasonable driving range. The Tesla would be my dream all-electric car, just in case anyone wants to know what to buy me for Christmas.
The most shocking part of the film was that the car companies refused to let the owners of electric cars in California renew their leases. They took electric cars away from consumers who wanted them and had them all demolished. That pretty well sums up the auto-manufacturer's' commitment to consumer choice when it comes to clean cars.
Still, Steve asserted that it was Clean Car regulations that would limit consumer choice in his unlikely scenario that consumers will soon be rushing to purchase higher mileage vehicles, when finally given a choice, as gas prices surpass $3.00 per gallon.
I was very happy to see two Representatives, Mike Boland and Elaine Nekritz, make the same point about consumer choice which I wrote about in a previous blog post. They both spoke of their desire to buy an American, union-made car that gets great gas mileage, such as a hybrid. Nekrtiz said that she could only find one car that met her criteria of being green and American made. American car companies are not giving consumers good choices and the UAW is not representing its membership well when they support company efforts to resist providing a product that consumers want.
The other argument of the car manufacturers' is that they don't have the ability to meet the regulations. Historically, that's an argument that is always made, yet they somehow find a way to meet whatever requirements are passed without the doomsday scenarios coming to fruition. And historically, the car manufacturers do no more than they are required to do. One thing I do appreciate from the testimony of the opponents is that I gained an appreciation for how complex this issue is, so I plan on doing more research.
The bill passed committee on a 7-5 vote. I didn't write down how each member voted so I'll post that information when the transcript is available on the House website.