January 6, 2009     Reported By: Tom Porter

A new regional agreement to limit carbon emissions could help ignite an economic boom here in Maine, according to some environmental activists.  Eleven Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states have agreed to create a low carbon fuel standard to reduce greenhouse gas pollution - something which they say would expand the market for cleaner fuels because all of the states would be using the same fuel.

"This is incredibly exciting," says Steve Hinchman, staff attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, a New England environmental advocacy group that's been pushing for the agreement.  "There's high potential that we could, through a regional low carbon fuel standard, finally attack the extremely high carbon intensity of our transportation system."

In Maine and the rest of New England, says Hinchman, vehicle emissions are the number one source of pollution.

Apart from the New England states, the initiative also includes New York, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania...
With the exception of Pennsylvania, all of those states have already signed up to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative - known as REGGI - a cap and trade system designed to limit carbon emissions from power plants. Now they're turning their focus to vehicle fuels and have pledged to come up with a concrete plan by the end of the year.  It's an ambitious timetable, says Commissioner David Littel, who heads Maine's Department of Environmental Protection, but an important one to stick to.

"Nationally there's a consensus that we need to deal with motor vehicle transportation emissions, to deal with the global warming. That's got to be part of a federal plan, it has to be part of a regional, and it's part of our state plan. So this fits in with where all the states are going. California has a low carbon fuel standard as part of their greenhouse gas act."

All this amounts to further pressure on the beleagured U-S auto industry to deliver cleaner and more efficient motor vehicles.
Charles Territo is spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. which represents 11 of the world's top carmakers.
He says the industry welcomes cleaner fuels, but "the biggest problem is expanding the infrastructure," he says.  "Currently, there are close to 12 million alternative fuel automobiles on the road, but there are very few alternative fuel stations for those vehicles."

"That's a red herring," says CLF'S Hinchman.  "That's not the bottleneck, because what they're talking about is increasing the amount of ethanol in the fuels, and half the fleet is already flex-fuel vehicles, and increasingly more so."

The Maine DEP's David Littel is excited by the economic opportunity that the clean fuel movement brings to Maine and other New England states, with their wealth of timber.  "Producing fuels from cellulosic ethanol from wood may be an issue that's particularly feasible in the northeast, and the Red Shield facility in Old Town has a DOE grant to investigate that."

Hinchman says under the Bush administration, individual states have had to take the lead on cutting carbon emissions. "For 8 years we've had an EPA that's refused to lift a finger to attack climate change, and so the states are continuing to step into the vacuum and push the envelope, and really lean on the business community and consumers to develop technologies and use technologies that will reduce our carbon emissions."

But, he says he's hopeful that the Environmental Protection Agency under a new Obama administration, will follow the lead set by states like Maine and implement a national emissions standard.