Clean Fuels Standard (CFS)

The transportation sector is the region’s largest and fastest growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, and we need to act swiftly to reverse the trend. Doing so will require developing new markets for cleaner transportation fuels, implementing policies to promote more efficient vehicles, reducing vehicle miles traveled via smart growth, and creating better public transportation options.

To address the first point, CLF and other environmental advocates support a regional Clean Fuels Standard (CFS), a technology-neutral policy that would create a robust market for cleaner transportation fuels. The CFS would simultaneously discourage investment in new, environmentally devastating high-carbon fuels made from tar sands, oil shale and liquid coal. In addition to combating climate change, the CFS would help attain regional and national goals of energy independence.

Eleven Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states have agreed to develop recommendations for a regional CFS, which is expected to generate local economic development and technological innovation, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. CLF, along with a broad coalition of environmental organizations and other stakeholders, is working to ensure that the proposed Northeast/Mid-Atlantic CFS will have strong environmental safeguards.

The coalition is calling for the program to include full lifecycle accounting for greenhouse gas emissions for all fuels, including accounting for indirect land-use change impacts associated with biofuels. The program should also address heating fuels, such as through an anti-backsliding mandate that would protect against increased use of ultra high-carbon fuels in the heating sector, including by avoiding “shuffling” of such higher carbon fuels out of the transportation sector and into the heating sector.

The coalition is urging the governors to move with greater urgency, developing a program framework by the end of 2010 and committing to a 10% reduction in the carbon intensity of fuels.