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“Gas Pain” At Pump And Smokestack

A California license plate seen recently that said, “Gas Pain,” might be the sly joke of a gastroenterologist, but it’s not on a Mercedes. So let’s stipulate that it means pain at the pump, with a gallon of regular gas stuck for months  at around $4.40. This kind of price is as usual fueled by investor speculation and an oil industry that cuts supply to drive up profit. But the license plate could just as well be about a different kind of gas-a  big increase in greenhouse gas emissions by the state’s oil refineries.

A California license plate seen recently that said, “Gas Pain,” might be the sly joke of a gastroenterologist, but it’s not on a Mercedes. So let’s stipulate that it means pain at the pump, with a gallon of regular gas stuck for months  at around $4.40. This kind of price is as usual fueled by investor speculation and an oil industry that cuts supply to drive up profit. But the license plate could just as well be about a different kind of gas-a  big increase in greenhouse gas emissions by the state’s oil refineries.

California refineries “emit 19-33% more greenhouse gases (GHG) per  barrel [of crude oil] refined than those in any other major U.S.  refining region,” according to a recent report for  the Union of Concerned Scientists. The reason is a corresponding increase in the amount of heavier, dirtier crude oil processed,  including dark, sticky tar sands oil from Canada. The gasoline produced at the end of the process is no dirtier-but the gases that could otherwise come from your tailpipe are going up the refinery smokestack instead.

A story in Inside Climate Today points  to requirements that refiners remove sulfur pollutants from gasoline and diesel fuels. Such scrubbing is harder to do with the cheaper, dirtier tar oil, and refiners may emit more carbon pollutants during a longer refining process, especially as they try to squeeze out more fuel from every barrel of oil.

California isn’t yet capping refiinery pollution, and this week delayed putting financial teeth in planned emission caps. Pardon us for thinking oil industry lobbying could have had something to do with it.

No one is forcing refiners to buy Canadian tar oil-refiners want because it’s cheaper than lighter oils and produces a bigger profit.  It’s the same reason oil companies are demanding their high-volume Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas, which could make California  refinery pollution look like a clear day in spring. Exxon Mobil officials won’t even admit that the tar oil is dirtier to refine. From a Texas story on the pipeline:

An ExxonMobil spokesperson refused to specify how much heavy crude the company’s refineries are already processing in Texas or might process if the pipeline is completed. Nor would the company respond to questions about how refining tar sands oil affects the amount of air pollution created by the plants.

Extra profit also comes from U.S. refiners exporting gasoline and diesel fuel at record rates. Fuel is now America’s top export, even as refiners import the dirtiest oil to make it.  Domestic pump prices go up and the refinery pollution burden on Americans goes up while other nations reap the clean fuel.

Californians are already buying and driving cleaner cars and cutting consumption. All families prize clean air, but those who live near  refineries are suffering more, not less, pollution. There’s “gas pain” for everyone except the oil industry and its servants in government, as in a Congress that won’t even trim the industry’s billions in corporate welfare.

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Posted by Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Environment

CARB Approves Nation’s Most Aggressive CO2 Emissions Regime

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Scheme comes out of AB32, the landmark climate change bill

by Brian Leubitz

In Washington, Congress is twiddling its thumbs as they debate what science stopped debating years ago.  Rather than aggresively taking on the environmental challenges of our lifetime and building a new sustainable economy, we are pretending the problems don’t exist.  Sure, we apparently care about the budget deficit that we are handing future generations, but a livable planet is apparently a luxury that we don’t care to pass on.

But California, as they say, is different.  We passed AB32, with a Republican Governor, yet. And today, we have a real system to put in place:

California has cap & trade – or will once the program starts ramping up next year. Today’s approval by the state’s Air Resources Board was described by chair Mary Nichols as like “moving a large army a few feet in one direction.”

The objective that “army” is marching – or shuffling – toward is, of course, the fulfillment of California’s goal to roll back greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the end of this decade. With at least a semi-intentional pun, Nichols calls cap & trade the “capstone” of that effort, although the program is expected to produce at most, 20% of the hoped-for reductions in carbon emissions. The rest will come from other measures either lumped under or related to the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, more widely known as AB 32.

Those other measures include stricter standards for tailpipe emissions, a “low-carbon fuels standard” (still being worked on), and the ambitious-but-attainable goal to get a third of the state’s electricity from renewable energy sources, also by 2020. (KQED Climate Change Blog)

Across California, cities and counties are actually doing something about climate change. In fact, San Francisco recently announced that the City has reduced carbon emissions levels 12 percent below 1990 levels.

There is a lot more hard work to come, but it is really, really good to see this unanimous vote on the cap and trade system.