CEA vice president Michael Whatley was a featured guest last Thursday on XM Radio’s “The Dave Nemo Show,” a favorite morning drive program of the trucking industry, where he discussed the latest movement on a national LCFS, and took the opportunity to explain some of the findings from CEA’s latest study on the economic and energy impacts of the policy. Listen to the full interview HERE. The following are a few key comments from Michael:
- “Even the guys that have created this program will admit none of the low carbon fuels that they are trying to force drivers into using are ready for primetime. And the vernacular that they use is that this is a technology-forcing regulation, which means that if we mandate that people use it, then someone will come along and make it. Our economy can’t stand that kind of whipsaw right now.”
- “Consumer Energy Alliance actually put out a study about a month ago that showed that if you put a low carbon fuel standard in place, it’s going to raise gas and diesel prices by 90 percent over five years, and up to 170 percent over ten years. So we’re basically going to go anywhere from doubling to tripling our gas prices for the next ten years…”
- “You can get people to drive less. You can get people to burn less gas … These are all different ways that you can try and reduce emissions, [but] at the end of the day when you’re talking about diesel or you’re talking about gasoline, a gallon is a gallon is a gallon. [Y]ou cannot reduce the carbon emissions that are coming off of combusting a gallon of diesel or a gallon of gasoline. They call it a hydrocarbon for a reason.”
- “Cellulosic ethanol, and renewable diesel; those are great things. But the fact is that our economy is completely dependent on being able to move goods around the country, and being able to move people around the country and so we can’t take gasoline and diesel off the table until those other fuels are ready for primetime. “
- ”We did a forum on low carbon fuel standards in Boston last month and we had Anne Lynch from the Massachusetts Motor Transportation Association up there come and speak at the forum and she said … 93.5 percent of all goods in Massachusetts are coming from the bed of a truck. … Now if you’re going to double your transportation costs for everything that goes in the grocery store or everything in a furniture store in the northeast, what is that going to do to the prices of those things? The economic ripple effect … would be absolutely extraordinary.”
- “There is a climate change and energy bill that Senator [Harry] Reid intends to bring up sometime this fall and we fully expect to see folks trying to impose a low carbon fuel standard on that bill. And we also expect, frankly, that we’re going to see some folks talking about an amendment on the OCS bill and try to get a low carbon fuel standard in there… So fortunately right now it looks like we’ve dodged a bullet, but we can’t really rest on our laurels at this point.”
