California's AB 1493: trendsetting or setting ourselves up to fail?

• Position: Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles - Excerpts from 2002 UCLA School of Law Environmental Law Symposium on AB 1493 - Panel Discussion

On July 22, 2002, California's state legislature courageously stepped deeper into the national economic and political minefield of automobile emissions regulation. California once again thrust itself into the forefront of environmental legislation by enacting Assembly Bill 1493 (AB 1493), a law directly aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. AB 1493 mandates that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) develop and implement greenhouse gas limits for vehicles beginning in model year 2009. Rather than target particular classes or models of cars, the legislation applies to manufacturers' fleet averages, thereby permitting automakers to decide how best to meet the required limits. Additionally, automakers who reduce emissions from sources other than autos (for example, factories) will be able to apply those reductions to their fleet averages.

AB 1493 is a significant step in domestic greenhouse gas regulation. However, whether California's approach to automobile emissions foreshadows a coming wave of sister state environmental regulation or is merely an aberration from a land of tree-hugging extremists remains to be seen. The issue will no doubt receive a good deal of attention between now and 2009. This special edition issue on AB 1493 will help to provide a foundation for that discussion. It includes relevant excerpts from the transcript of the debate on the law at the 2002 UCLA School of Law Environmental Law Symposium on AB 1493, as well as the legislative history and the statute itself The symposium participants (in order of appearance) were: Jonathan Zasloff Acting Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Jonathan Varat, Dean and Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Ann Carlson, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Dr. Robert J. Lempert, Senior Physical Scientist, Rand Corporation; Kal Raustiala, Acting Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; K.G. Duleep, Managing Director, Transportation, Energy and Environmental Analysts, Inc; Louis Browning, Transportation, IFC Consulting; Jan Mazurek, Director of the Center on Innovation and the Environment, Progressive Policy Institute.

The editors believe this special edition will provide the reader with a comprehensive overview and focal point to understand current and anticipate future economic, political, and environmental debates surrounding California's cutting-edge greenhouse gas regulations. Like AB 1493 itself, these excerpts are meant to invite the reader into a conversation that, one day, will likely grow into a national or even an international dialogue.

RELEVANT EXCERPTS FROM THE 2002 UCLA SCHOOL OF LAW ENVIRONMENTAL LAW SYMPOSIUM ON AB 1493:

Zasloff: Good afternoon. My name is Jonathan Zasloff. I am the moderator of the panel today and in order to welcome you all, I would like to introduce the Dean of the UCLA School of Law, Jonathan Varat.

Varat: Thank you, [Professor Zasloff].... It is a wonderful thing to see quite as diverse a group of people in our audience as we have here today. We actually have people here who are from the science community, the law community, the regulator and automotive community, and law students and faculty. That's exactly one of the things that we are trying to accomplish with the Evan-Frankel Environmental Law and Policy program, so I am thrilled that there are all you good people out there to listen to all these good people up here.

My second set of thanks goes to our co-sponsors. First of all, the UCLA School of Law Evan-Frankel Environmental Policy program.... Second, thank you to the Environmental Law Section of the State Bar of California for participating in and supporting this particular program. We hope to do more work with them, connecting our students and our entire school with them....

UCLA Law launched its Environmental Law Center last spring. The idea was and is going forward to develop environmental law and policy with an inter-disciplinary focus and to take advantage of all the resources of the University of California, which are many in science, economics, and policy and technology....

[Politicians often] delegate most of the difficult questions to regulators in the administrative agencies. This raises one of the major questions for today. What are the regulators supposed to do in trying to actually make these overall objectives and goals work?

Then there are the questions about whether the economic impact of these things will be an absolute disaster for the car and oil industries. On the other hand, will they be effective in reducing gas emissions and pollution at all? Will the policymakers balance the costs and benefits effectively? Many of these answers will be based on the input of scientists and technologists....

With that I am going to turn it over to [Professor] Zasloff, who is a wonderfully young and energetic environmental law faculty member here at UCLA. It was principally his idea to have this particular forum today. So [Zasloff], it is all yours.

Zasloff: Thanks. I want to get right to the panel, and the easiest way is to tell you who they are. The one comment I will make, though, is that the legal theorist Grant Gilmore once said, "In heaven there will be no law and the lion will lie down with the lamb. And in hell, there will be nothing but law and due process will be meticulously observed." Well up here today we are in neither heaven nor hell, but what that means is that we have some law and some not law and that is good. That is the way the Center is supposed to work; the only way in which lawyers can learn more about their world is by looking at other people and other disciplines. Other people in other disciplines can learn a lot about their world by talking to lawyers, so it is a good mix and a good balance that we have here....

The first person I would like to introduce is Dr. Louis Browning from ICF Consulting, who is a principal in their transportation program. He is internationally recognized as an expert in non-petroleum fuels and advanced transportation technologies. He has examined improvements in vehicle fuel technology, in engine technology and used his engineering expertise in protecting fuel economy for advanced technologies such as electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, and fuel cells. He has a doctorate in mechanical engineering from Stanford. As an aside, I can say on one issue I talked to a friend of mine who also works at ICF and who said that the reason Browning is at ICF is because if you want to do something having to do with environmentalism or air quality in California, Browning has to be on your team. We're very glad that he's on our team today.

It is a great pleasure to welcome K.G. Duleep, who is the managing director of transportation at Energy and Environmental Analysis, Inc. He is also an internationally recognized expert on vehicular fuel economy and emissions issues. He has been advising governments and putting together programs concerning vehicle technology and fuel technology not only for the United States Environmental Protection Agency [(EPA)] or the Department of Energy and in California, but literally around the world in Canada, Sweden, Australia, Taiwan, and other countries where technology evaluations and forecasts are critical to doing environmental regulation. And he is particularly helpful to us not only because is he is very good at doing the economics [of regulation], but also in terms of engineering and the interplay between economics and engineering that is going to be absolutely critical.

We are also pleased to have on the science side Dr. Robert Lempert from RAND. He is a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, who is an expert, among other things, in atmospheric sciences in terms of the climate aspect of what we are talking about today.... One of the things that Rob does that is particularly interesting is not just traditional quantitative forecasting, but [forecasting using] a more advanced scenario model that he will discuss in just a few moments. It talks particularly about how you make decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And he's been doing a lot of measurements of these kinds of issues for a whole variety of bodies, including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, California public universities, and other important state governments around the country as well as federal governments internationally.

We are also very pleased to have Jan Mazurek of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. She is the director of the Center on Innovation and Environment at the Progressive Policy Institute. Her work focuses on the ways in which you can update the first generation of environmental management techniques. She previously served as an analyst in the claim markets division of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, she is an expert on voluntary environmental agreements, and she has worked in doing and evaluating these kinds of agreements for a wide variety of organizations, including Resources for the Future, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. She is the author of two major books, both on environmental, science and technology policy: making microchips, restructuring policy and globalization in the semiconductor industry, and then [evaluating the system of] pollution control in the United States.

And last but far from least, it is also a pleasure to introduce a couple of my colleagues who are here to provide a lot of the important legal side of this. Kal Raustiala is a colleague not only here at the law school but for our partner and co-sponsor the Institute for the Environment. He is both lawyer and political scientist. He has a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert not only in international environmental law and international politics, but also in international trade law, international security law, and how all of these interact with world politics in...