auto emissions – Enviro Updates

Sierra Lopez, BAY AREA NEWS GROUP

A movement that began with specific concerns about a station near a school campus in Petaluma is spreading beyond the North Bay.

When Pinole made news last month for being the first East Bay city to ban new gas stations, the small community of 18,000 was tapping into a trend that has been spreading through the Bay Area for the last three years.

It all started when Petaluma became the first city in the country to ban new gas stations in 2021. But the activists who originally launched that first effort had no idea it would turn into a movement — in fact, JoAnn McEachin, a Petaluma resident who helped start the group NoGasHere a decade ago, says she had no intention of becoming an activist at the time, and she wasn’t even opposed to new gas stations in general.

Her issue was with a 16-pump gas station that had been proposed by the supermarket chain Safeway in 2013. Petaluma, a North Bay city of 60,000 residents, already had 16 gas stations, but her specific issue was with its location — the grocer was looking to build on the corner of McDowell Boulevard and Maria Drive, just across the street from a campus that housed an elementary school, a child development center and a preschool.

McEachin believed being upwind from the roughly 2,000 vehicles it was estimated would drive in and out of the station per day would put the children at risk of poor air quality. She connected with a group of other concerned residents — many of them local moms — who rallied together to form NoGasHere, bringing skills from their day jobs as lawyers, marketing professionals, teachers and administrative assistants to their cause.

“(Safeway) pissed off a lot of women,” said McEachin. “It makes my blood boil when I think about it.”

Coral Davenport and Hiroko Tabuchi, THE NEW YORK TIMES

An executive at another large automaker said his company was considering joining the agreement because it includes meaningful concessions by California. The executive, who spoke on condition that neither he nor his company be identified, said that the Obama-era fuel economy standards were difficult for the industry to meet because car buyers increasingly prefer sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks that tend to have much lower fuel economy than sedans.

Four of the world’s largest automakers have struck a deal with California to reduce automobile emissions, siding with the state, and against President Trump, in a bitter fight over one of the president’s most consequential regulatory rollbacks.

In coming weeks, the Trump administration is expected to all but eliminate a signature Obama-era regulation designed to reduce vehicle emissions that contribute to global warming. However, California and 13 other states have vowed to keep enforcing the stricter rules, potentially splitting the United States auto market in two, with car companies forced to build different lineups of vehicles for different states.

The prospect of that nightmare scenario for automakers spawned secretive talks in recent weeks between California regulators and four auto giants — Ford Motor Company, Volkswagen of America, Honda and BMW — in which the automakers won slightly less restrictive rules that they can apply to vehicles sold nationwide.

The agreement provides “much-needed regulatory certainty,” the companies said in a joint statement, while enabling them to “meet both federal and state requirements with a single national fleet, avoiding a patchwork of regulations.”

Environmental Center of Sonoma County

Tag: auto emissions

How a Petaluma Safeway controversy kicked off the spread of gas station bans across the Bay Area

Automakers, rejecting Trump pollution rule, strike a deal with California