The Bush administrations fuel economy plan was rejected by 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Thursday. The court ruled that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “failed to address why the so-called light trucks are allowed to pollute more than passenger cars and didn’t properly assess greenhouse gas emissions when it set new minimum miles-per-gallon requirements for models in 2008 to 2011,” according to the Associated Press.
The court ordered the White House to examine why it continues to consider light trucks differently than cars. Regulators made a distinction between cars and light trucks decades ago when most trucks were used for commercial purposes.
NHTSA had argued that it considered the intent of the manufacturer in making light trucks, rather than their actual highway use, in developing the new fuel standards.
“But this overlooks the fact that many light trucks today are manufactured primarily for transporting passengers,” Fletcher wrote for the three-judge panel.
Fletcher also wrote that the administration failed to consider the benefit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“It did, however, include an analysis of the employment and sales impacts of more stringent standards on manufacturers,” Fletcher wrote.
The court also took the administration to task for refusing to include in the new standards trucks weighing more than 8,500 pounds, a class that includes the Hummer H2, Ford F250 and other popular large vehicles.
The court ordered NHTSA to develop fuel standards for these large trucks or give a better reason than the agency’s argument that it has never regulated those large trucks and that more testing needs to be done.
“This historic ruling vindicates our fight against fuel economy standards that are a complete sham and a gift to the auto industry,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who also joined the lawsuit.
Oh no, someone has irritated Richard Blumenthal. Now their destruction is assured.
Court Rebukes Bush Fuel Economy Plan [AP]
(Photo:George E. Norkus)
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@trai_dep:
Actually I do have a good understanding of half-life and it doesn’t bother me at all that it litteraly would take forever to render itself inert. I have no issue with the storage and disposal of the by products of Nuclear power waste so long as hose who do it exceed the standard when doing, which good companies do, those that dont, and there have been a few in the past, dont stay in business. I’m so glad you want us to use alternate fuels just so long as it doesn’t affect you watching TV, having hot water, heat or light in your house. The best place for use to reduce our dependency on oil is to start with electrical power plants which use over half the oil imported to the US every day. And power plants dont have the same emmission standard(they are less stringent and allowed to pollute more) as the vehicles we all drive. So go ahead, keep being a NIMBY, hopefully, we’ll one day have a congress who will be smart and use some of the closed military bases in the middle of nowhere and allow them to be used by companies who wish to build a nuclear power plant to lessen our dependency and use of oil.
And your comment on the trucks, you are wrong in your conclusion. All trucks, unless they run on deasel, get the same emmissions as you passenger car. They just dont get the same milage. Hell some trucks actually are lower in the emmissions department then alot of cars on the road.
A link for those to look over who think Global Warming isn’t some liberal nut job scam.
[icecap.us]
@Logan26: Being highly opinionated and extremely ignorant are not two things that go well together.
Let’s start with this one:
Well, according to the US Department of Energy petroleum liquids (aka: oil) account for 0.01% of fuel inputs for electrical generation. That means your assertion of “half” is off by a factor of about 5000. Refer to the table in section 1.1 and do the math yourself if you care to.
Next,
Follow with me here: One car and one truck emit the same amount of pollutants per gallon of gasoline used. Assume the car gets gas mileage X, and a truck gets mileage of 0.75X. Ergo, for the same distance traveled the truck has emissions 1.33X greater than the car; or 33% more. Get it? You can have the same emissions per unit, but if you burn more units, you create more pollution.
A link for those who think global warming is some liberal nutjob scam:
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The IPCC categorically states that global warming is occurring and is caused by human activity. This statement has been ratified by representatives from over 130 countries, including the United States. Likewise, the conclusions of the IPCC are based on the peer-reviewed research and analysis of over 1200 scientists and analysts.
I’ll take their opinion over that of the few dozen fringe elements and tv weathermen represented at the site you link to.
And I think we can throw in [realclimate.org], too. Yay for actual science instead of pseudoskepticism.
Please close the light truck loophole! It’s only encouraged abuse and SUV bloat over the last 20 years.
@DallasDMD: Not only that, but lots of published peer-reviewed research proving that the above statement is BS?
Have not heard many people say this – I guess most people only care if it is going to directly affect them in some catastrophic way.
Even if global warming did not exist, we should still be doing all we can not to destroy our planet.
@trai_dep: The half life of transuranics may be +10,000 yrs, but heavy metals such as the arsenic and mercury spewed into the air from fossil fuel plants is forever.
I once did a calculation that showed that if you took ALL the spent nuclear fuel up to this point in the U.S., and stacked it side-by-side in an area the size of a football field, it would only be 3-4 feet high.
Doesn’t seem like that much waste for 50+ years of power, does it?
@Skiffer: Another of my favorite stats:
A coal plant releases more radiation into the atmosphere annually than a nuclear plant (due to natural uranium in the coal).
@JiminyChristmas: I won’t pretend to know the real numbers, but your evidence is flawed:
That 0.01% of oil used for electrical generation could very well be 50% of the imported oil – you’re comparing two different numbers.
(see, since we’ll never get the crime rate down to zero, I’m removing my front door)
And, since we’re discussing football analogies, how many people would a football-sized lump of spent uranium poison when it leaks into a reservoir or the Colorado River? A city?
That Russian reporter that was poisoned a few months back with isotopes died a horrible, wasting death because of micrograms of the stuff. But nice try at shifting perceptions thru deceitful half-truths. Really.
@trai_dep: Deceitful half-truths? Never heard basic verifiable scientific facts labeled that…
All I did was point out the misconception some people have between the weight and volume of nuclear waste (i.e., uranium is really really dense).
No one said nuclear waste isn’t harmful, just that the waste from fossil plants is also harmful (think, football-shaped lump of mercury or lead).
But the nuclear industry practices something that none of the fossil plants do – stewardship. They manage their waste. Sure, the fossil plants have to regulate SOX/NOX emissions, but there’s a lot more that they don’t have to regulate (beyond just CO2), and no one realizes that.
There’s nothing wrong with generating waste (Everyone poos). For nuclear power, you get a heck of a lot of energy, from domestic resources, and all the waste is in a small containable volume.
Even animals know to shit in the corner…
@Skiffer: Right you are. Unlike certain right-wing commenters here, I will do my best to correct the error.
According to the EIA the US imports 3.7 billion barrels of oil per year.
Here, they state that 310,000 barrels of oil are used per day for electrical generation, which translates to 113.2 million barrels per year.
So, divide 113.2million by 3.7billion and you get 0.03, or 3%. Ergo, our climate change denier is off by a factor of only about 17, rather than 50.
@Skiffer: i’m not sure where your data comes from, but i don’t think it’s very accurate. perhaps all the spent fuel would fill that area, but there is much, much more waste to account for. here’s the super-short list: [www.nrc.gov] (click links on LLW, HLW, & uranium mill tailings to get an idea of what each category contains).
i challenge you to investigate just one site – the savannah river project. i know a few individuals that worked down there at the beginning of the cleanup, when waste was literally just dumped on the ground (i believe the term is “open containment” – haha!). perhaps there would have been just a few tons of waste had it been properly managed the first time, though it’s doubtful considering that site had been producing & utilizing heavy water for our weapons program for almost 50 years.
now, i know you’re gonna try to say something along the lines of our nuclear fuel program is separate from our nuclear weapons program, but i think we’re all intelligent enough to realize that’s a red herring. if it were even remotely true, we would have retrofitted our reactors for the PUREX process 20 years ago to generate more power from less fuel & produce extremely less toxic waste (but then we couldn’t have stockpiled >30,000 warheads). oh yeah, that & weapons-producing facilities (like savannah) are managed by the DOE.
@mac-phisto: I’m having some trouble understanding what exactly your arguing points are…
My original response was to Trai_Deeps comment:
As such, yes – I was only pointing out the volume/weight difference for high level waste – and arguing that the “3 million tons” of “spent nuclear waste” wasn’t really that much volume.
The calculation in my original white paper was roughly:
50,000 metric tons of spent fuel * 19 g/cm^3 (uranium density) = 209272 ft^3
20972 ft^3 / (120 * 60 yards^2) => 3.23 ft high
It seems my former employer revised the calculation to account for actual fuel assemblies (instead of assuming it was pure uranium), before providing it to the NEI. It seems the final number is “a football field 6 yards deep”:
[www.nei.org]
Still, I consider being off by a factor of 7.4 to still be accurate enough for a blog post…especially when you have people using “3 million tons” when “50,000 tons” is more appropriate.
As for the Savannah river site, all I can offer is that is not the status quo at your typical nuclear power plant. If Savannah’s open containments were used for low level waste, that isn’t too bad – most low level waste is either buried in (specially designated) landfills or incinerated. There is a much larger volume of low-level waste generated every year (adding roughly 2 ft/year to our football field)…but it’s typically only radioactive for a century or less, which isn’t that bad, again, considering the infinite half lives of the heavy metals released from fossil plants.
@Skiffer: the deceitful truthiness part is suggesting the problem with energy waste is bulk, and insinuating that since the total direct waste (apart from equally harmful indirect waste, as Macphisto aptly points out), which containing shockingly low mass, is absurdly toxic at miniscule levels for time scales that are barely conceivable. Par for the course, but still…
Back to the point, I’m genuinely at a loss to explain how people – supposedly ones that care about their kids, nephews, nieces, etc. – can play semantic games with rhetorical flourish over matters which will literally make their children’s lives barely worth living. What do they say to them? “Tee hee – polar bears – all extinct. Sorry, hon. But wasn’t it a giggle delaying Global Warming for a decade?”
No wonder their children grow up to hate them so.
I think those concerned with the environment should reconsider nuclear power, since it’s perhaps the only viable fuel source that doesn’t releases greenhouse gases. Awhile ago I heard Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, talking on the radio about how he supported it. He pointed out that today’s reactors are of a far better design than yesteryear, making a meltdown highly unlikely, and that it was the association with nuclear weapons that turned a lot of environmentalists off in the first place. I’m far from a supporter of nuclear weapons, but if what MAC-PHISTO says is true (that over 30,000 warheads are already stockpiled) then building more nuclear plants now probably won’t make a difference in the number of nuclear weapons.
@trai_dep: Sorry, Logan26′s “global warming isn’t real” comments got mixed up with his “we should build more nuclear plants” comments…
I definitely agree that global warming is real and we need to do something about it – I’m arguing that I think what we need to do is build more nuclear plants.
And I never argued, or tried to hide, how toxic nuclear waste was – I just pointed out that it’s a much smaller volume (not mass) than most people realize – which makes it easier to contain vs. fossil plant waste.
There’s some good stats here on C02 emissions prevented due to nuclear power:
[www.nei.org]
I wish wind/solar/hydro were viable options for non-CO2 power, but the truth is we can’t implement those on the scales needed for the bulk of our electricity generation. (You’d need around 1,000 wind turbines for each nuclear reactor, with the wind blowing full-time).
Skiffer -
I totally agree that we have some very difficult choices to make. It’s not as though there’s a magic bullet we can simply choose to continue going like we are. I tend to lean towards conservation/lifestyle/expectation changes, then work outward from there. But even that is only a dent. And that’s only accounting for the US.
I also like how you’re presenting things in an open way. Sorry if I reacted poorly (heh, hackles raised by previous commentators, my bad).
@Skiffer: i was simply arguing that the idea that nuclear waste takes up a little more than an acre (even 6 yards deep using your 2nd calculation), is inaccurate. it doesn’t take into account other byproducts of the generation. for example, your link simply defines HLW as spent uranium fuel. what of the uranium, thorium, radium & plutonium that are byproducts of the mining, milling & enrichment processes? or the solid waste that arises from the process of decommissioning a reactor? these are not considered spent fuel (& are not addressed by the NEI page, yet in many cases they are classified by the IAEA as HLW.
let’s talk about total cost here. nuclear power has its place, but imo, the future holds much more promising sources of fuel. they may not contain such high energy as fission ( i don’t think either of us will be alive for the advent of cold fusion – if it’s ever realized), but couple low-level power generation on a massive scale with a collective reduction in wasted energy & i think we’ll find a way to make it work.
think forward -> don’t produce more; waste less.
even though we’ve strayed a bit, i think overall this has been a pretty great discussion. nuclear’s definitely on the table & people can certainly take issue with fossil fuel power plants as much as vehicle fuel standards – the energy cos. have been dodging their responsibility for pollution for decades. & in the end, i don’t think global warming is even the issue…it’s reducing our impact on our environment to make the world more liveable for more people. at least, that’s what i think.
One of the reasons why the nuke industry has gotten a past is that they use “costs” that don’t account for externalities, such as how to store something that is mind-blowingly toxic that even if it merely touches something else, that thing is toxic too. And remains mind-blowingly toxic for not one, two or three times a human lifetime, or even ten times that. But for a healthy multiple of the entire time since humanity learned to write. That’s freaky. And beyond our scale of reference to reliably trust viable solutions to emerge.
Another thing is that, since the DOE runs much of these places, and Der Homeland Security the rest, any malfeasance is automatically classified. And spills, leakages, cost overages part of “our” national security.
I’m sure that if Detroit had the same advantages, SUVs would have official MPG ratings far exceeding imports. Since they’d run off of puppy-breaths, unicorn eyelashes and other wholesome things.