Bureaucrats battle over electric cars

The US Environmental Protection Agency has gotten into a spitting match with the Massachusetts Office of Environmental Affairs, and I feel just the way Henry Kissinger did when the Iran-Iraq war broke out.

"Isn't there some way," he wondered, "that both of them could lose?"

This fight -- I kid you not -- is about electric cars.

It starts with a Massachusetts law so boneheaded that 48 other states have refused to adopt it. Signed by Gov. Michael Dukakis and embraced by his successor, it decrees that 2 percent of all cars sold in the state by 1998 (rising to 10 percent by 2003) be electrically powered. This, you understand, is for Mother Nature's sake: Battery-operated cars that need recharging every few dozen miles are supposed to be cleaner than cars powered by internal combustion.

Massachusetts' environmental autocrats had expected the EPA to bless this law and to urge other Northeastern states to consider adopting their own electric car quotas. But the EPA -- in a surprising fit of reasonableness -- seems inclined to do the opposite: urge Massachusetts to repeal its diktat and allow market forces to guide the selling and buying of electric cars.

And that has sent Environmental Affairs Secretary Trudy Coxe into a snit.

"It's pretty unbelievable on the part of the EPA," she sputtered the other day, "to think that as federal officials, they can trot all over our Legislature and our laws and treat them as insignificant."

Funny, Coxe never used to object when the EPA trotted all over Massachusetts. Indeed, Environmental Affairs and the EPA often trotted in tandem, ordering the Legislature to adopt all manner of unpopular measures -- and threatening the state with federal sanctions or the loss of highway dollars if it didn't.

Since 1990, envirobullies at the state and federal levels have joined in shoving a succession of costly clean air regulations down the driving public's throat. Service stations have had to spend thousands of dollars installing fancy pumps designed to trap gasoline fumes. Starting this fall, every new car sold in Massachusetts must include even more anti-emission devices. As of 1995 you'll have to drive to a regional testing center every 24 months for an "enhanced" emissions inspection (on top of the annual safety inspection at your local garage).

Other coming attractions: car pool lanes, parking bans, and reformulated gas that will cost up to 7 cents more per gallon.

Almost none of this has been necessary. For the clean little secret about Massachusetts air pollution is that there isn't very much of it.

Between 1970 (when the Clean Air Act was passed) and 1990, auto emissions decreased by 97 percent. Massachusetts hasn't exceeded the stiff carbon monoxide air quality standard since 1986. Our ozone levels now exceed the federal standard by no more than six or seven days out of the year -- a fraction of what what would happen a decade ago. What little ozone does plague Massachusetts mostly blows in from New York and New Jersey.

If clean air rules were based on common sense, the minor auto emissions problem that remains would be dealt with by focusing on the 10 percent of the cars that cause 50 to 70 percent of the pollution. The technology to accomplish that -- infrared beams that measure a vehicle's emissions as it drives past a sensor -- is well understood. On-road tests could easily identify the cars that actually pollute, while nonpolluting cars could continue, unhassled.

Imposing expensive and irritating burdens on every driver makes environmental regulators more powerful. It doesn't make air any cleaner.

Nor do electric cars.

The wonks call them "zero-emission vehicles," but the electricity to recharge their batteries comes from power-generating plants that burn oil or coal -- and emit pollution through smokestacks. A study released earlier this year calculated that driving a gasoline-powered car 200 miles produces 354 grams of carbon monoxide, compared with 393 grams for an electric car driven half that distance. Physicist Amory Lovins sums it up neatly: "Zero-emission vehicles are actually 'elsewhere-emission' vehicles."

And take the batteries (please). Lead-acid batteries are already an environmental problem, and electric cars go through them a lot faster than conventional cars do. When she's finished kvetching about the EPA trot, maybe Secretary Coxe can let us know where she'd like all those extra dead batteries dumped.

Between rechargings, electric cars have a 100-mile range - assuming they aren't driven up hills or in cold weather, and as long as the headlights, wipers, and radio aren't used. Price? $ 12,000 to $ 20,000 more than a gas-powered car. Some hobbyists like them. But people who actually need their cars to get around have so far shown zero interest in "zero-emissions" cars.

Electric cars are expensive, impractical, unwanted, and not especially clean. The wonder isn't that the green zealots of Environmental Affairs want to make you drive them anyway. It's that for once, even the EPA wants no part of so dumb an idea.


(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)