We’ve seen this play before: the oil industry is once again trying to scare California into giving it a free pass on pollution.
Last week, Big Oil cranked up, once again, its campaign to block the next critical step in California’s widely supported and successful clean energy law (AB 32) by backing last-minute radical changes to a bill by Assemblymember Henry Perea (D-Fresno) to exempt the oil industry from carbon pollution limits already in effect for California’s other major emitters.
Transportation is the single-largest source of pollution in the state – representing 40 percent of emissions. By playing by different rules, the oil industry would extend its free reign to pollute our air, harm our health, and threaten our most vulnerable communities. California’s ability to reduce its carbon pollution to meet AB32 requirements would also be threatened.
How is Big Oil trying to convince legislators to vote for a bill to let them pollute freely? By attempting to scare them using the same playbook they’ve employed for decades: issuing doom-and-gloom warnings of fuel cost impacts while hiding behind thinly-veiled front groups such as “CARE” and “FedUpAtThePump.”
What Big Oil doesn’t want you to know
California’s enormous progress toward a cleaner energy future should not be jeopardized on the basis of Big Oil’s misleading math which touts the oil industry’s costs to clean up its carbon pollution while excluding the enormous consumer fuel savings from AB32. Here’s what the oil industry ISN’T telling you about our state’s clean energy law.
1. Thanks to AB32, our vehicles are becoming far more efficient, we’ve got more ways to run them – like electricity – and our public transit options are increasing. Bottom line: less money out of our pockets for transportation fuels. NRDC analysis shows with AB32 the average household will save over $380 in fuel expenditures in 2015, compared to a scenario without California’s clean transportation measures. Those savings are on top of the oil industry’s costs of acquiring pollution permits. And these fuel savings grow to $850 by 2020 -- and a whopping $1560 annually by 2025.
theenergycollective