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An electric plug charges a Smart Car electric drive vehicle in New York.
(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
By Angus Duncan
The Oregonian does us a disservice by playing its own numbers game in opposing Oregon's vehicle Clean Fuels standard. The newspaper's Dec. 14 editorial challenged Gov. John Kitzhaber's assertion that moving to cleaner fuels could save Oregon drivers "up to $1.6 billion" in fuel costs. To be clear, that's exactly what the independent study commissioned by DEQ says transitioning to electric vehicles could do.
And this study isn't alone in forecasting savings for Oregonians moving to electric vehicles, the most promising low-carbon auto technology available under the clean fuels program. The Oregon Department of Transportation projects overall average household savings from (1) lower operating costs per mile (electricity is cheaper than gasoline), and (2) the vehicles themselves becoming competitively priced as costs of producing them come down.
In other places where a clean fuels program is operating, there's no evidence that it has driven the near-term price of gasoline up. Instead, it is giving consumers in those states more fuel choices, something that will be especially welcome when today's low oil prices spike up again.
Oregonians can also save some of the $5 billion that leaves the state every year to pay for imported oil. That's money going out the door instead of staying in Oregon to support job growth here.
But arguing numbers isn't the editorial board's real beef here. The editorial board doesn't like the vehicle fuel standard, apparently discounts its importance to lowering Oregon's carbon emissions and believes the best way to torpedo it is to stoke fears of a near-term travel cost increase. By the same reasoning we shouldn't be adopting energy efficient building codes or spending money on wind and solar. By this reasoning we would never have built the Columbia River hydropower system, which cost way more up front than Portland sticking with its gaslights.
But that was an investment, you might counter. And I'd agree. So are state initiatives that give us energy efficient homes and automobiles. So are fire and safety codes and regulating pollution — including carbon pollution — from auto tailpipes. We make these investments in return for valuable public benefits — like fewer cases of childhood asthma and the containment of costly weather extremes.
It takes sustained investment — public and private — to move a needed technology to commercial competitiveness. Wind energy in the 1980s cost upwards of 25 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), while coal and oil generation could be had for 5 cents to 10 cents per kWh. But we chose to support this promising renewable technology with tax credits, and today wind is entering the grid at between 3 cents and 8 cents per kWh, compared to new gas generation at 6 cents to 9 cents per kWh. (All costs unsubsidized, per a Lazard Freres 2014 study; and not including carbon costs.)
Oregon's clean fuels program works like our renewable portfolio standard, by helping carbon-efficient vehicle fuels get traction in the market.
The Oregonian editorial board's concern for costs of government mandates has me scratching my head in another respect: Why does the board give coal and oil a pass on the costs they impose — about $120 billion annually in health care costs alone, according to a 2009 study from the American Academy of Sciences, along with no small amount of uncompensated human suffering?
Instead, we continue to subsidize fossil fuels long past their need for market traction, to the tune (coincidentally) of some $120 billion since 1977, about five times the value of renewables subsidies over the same period. One of these ancient subsidies, the oil depletion allowance, has been on the books since World War I. A century ought to suffice for traction.
The Oregonian editorial board should be providing the rest of us with useful context for making the most of our energy, economic and environmental choices, not distracting us with its own numbers game.
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Angus Duncan is president of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and chair of the Oregon Global Warming Commission.