Carbon Nation: How U.S. Automakers Contribute to Global Warming -- And What They Can Do to Stop It

Posted: 30-Jul-2002; Updated: 12-Mar-2007

Senior fellow and car expert John DeCicco has recently co-authored the report Automakers' Corporate Carbon Burdens: Reframing Public Policy on Automobiles, Oil and Climate. DeCicco talks about how the "big six" automakers for the U.S. market contribute in a big way to global warming and challenges the industry to do what's right for the planet by designing vehicles that improve fuel economy and lower carbon dioxide emissions.

Q: What do you mean by the term "carbon burden"?

DeCicco: The carbon burden is how much carbon dioxide (CO₂) gets put into the atmosphere each year after a car company sells a new group of vehicles. CO₂ is, of course, the principal form of greenhouse gas pollution that causes global warming.

Q: How does carbon burden translate into barrels of oil?

DeCicco: Global warming pollution from cars is directly related to the amount of fuel they burn. In fact, every million barrels per day of oil that cars consume translates into 36.8 million metric tons of annual carbon (MMTc) emissions. Since U.S. cars and light trucks together consume 8.2 million barrels per day of oil, that translates into the 302 million metric tons of carbon that comes from our cars and trucks every year.

Q: So that's a huge percentage of global warming emissions?

DeCicco: That's right. One way to look at the global warming pollution from our cars and trucks is that it's the largest part [62 percent] of U.S. transportation carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, counting all forms of transportation. And our transportation CO₂ emissions are the largest part [one-third] of all of our CO₂ emissions, more than from factories, homes and everything else. And of course the United States itself is the world?s largest greenhouse gas polluter [contributing a quarter of the world's CO₂ emissions]. In that sense, tackling pollution from U.S. cars and trucks is the single most important step that needs to be done to tackle the global warming problem.

Q: Since 1970, the amount of miles driven has increased dramatically, but fuel economy has also risen for cars. According to your report, the United States did make a lot of progress in reducing overall CO₂ emissions from 1970 until the 1990s, when emissions started to rise again. What's the problem?

DeCicco: We made progress in the wake of the oil crisis of the seventies; that served as a wake-up call to the oil "risk" posed by our gasoline-driven transportation sector. And because the country passed fuel economy standards that required automakers to improve fuel economy, they did so-- up until the mid-eighties. But subsequently, public pressure subsided, and automakers blocked attempts to take fuel economy standards to the next level. So for the last decade we've been in a situation where carbon emissions are essentially rising out of control.

Q: How have SUVs and light trucks contributed to the rising carbon burden?

DeCicco: What's gone on in the past decade is that automakers shifted heavily to SUVs and light trucks, which use more fuel than passenger cars. And as car and truck usage continued to grow, carbon emissions continued to grow. At the same time, automakers essentially put all of their engineering talent and all of their design and marketing skills behind making vehicles ever bigger, ever heavier, ever more powerful, ever more luxurious. In other words, they have pursued priorities that are at great variance with what needs to be done to protect the planet.

Just to clarify a point of confusion, SUVs and other light trucks are required to meet CAFE standards -- they are just held to a lower standard, because of a loophole left in the law from the 1970s. Back then, light truck market share was quite smallerand the SUV as we know it today wasn't even invented. The issue is really one of closing that loophole, of holding them to a more appropriate, higher fuel economy standard.

Q: How does vehicle design impact the carbon burden for years to come?

DeCicco: Once a vehicle is designed, that model is going to be produced more or less the same way, except for cosmetic changes, for anywhere from 4 to 6 years. And that 4-6 years' worth of vehicle production is going to stay on the road for another 12 to15 years, which is about how long cars end up lasting on average. When that new car is rolled off the assembly line, that car's fuel economy is essentially set for its life; that represents a carbon burden for an individual vehicle that's going to be emitted into the atmosphere for the next 12 to 15 years.

Q: How easy or difficult would it be for automakers to lower their carbon burden in terms of existing technologies and designing vehicles to get better fuel economy?

DeCicco: There's plenty of technology available to do that. It's really a question of, "Where there's a will there's a way." There are dozens of things automakers can do to improve their engines and transmissions and streamline their vehicles that would maintain performance and safety and all the amenities that consumers need while cutting CO₂ emissions coming from vehicles. That?s what really needs to be done and where the opportunity is.

Q: Car makers plead that such changes are prohibitive -- are these technologies cost effective?

DeCicco: Definitely. Issue after issue, the car companies have cried wolf about new environmental and safety requirements and [yet], once imposed, time and time again we?ve seen they end up delivering products that are improved, that deliver better value, better quality, and are affordable for consumers all the way around.

The main problem is that the car companies are not factoring the carbon part of their responsibility for global warming into their product strategies. Since they are not doing it of their own volition, there's a real need to go forth with public polices (like the California greenhouse gas car bill) to compel them to do what in fact they have the ability to do.

Q: In your report, you analyze the carbon burdens of The Big Six, the six largest selling automakers in the United States -- what stands out in your analysis?

DeCicco: First of all, we can say pretty succinctly that GM is the number-one global warmer in terms of the auto industry, and that?s really significant because the auto industry is one of the world's largest industries. GM is number one because its market share is the largest, a reflection of that company's market success, and that brings a proportionate responsibility to address the carbon pollution from its vehicles.

That is one key message of this report: the responsibility for addressing the problem is directly related to the extent of a company's role in causing the problem, and in this case GM bears the greatest responsibility.

Another point that stands out in our analysis is how the carbon burdens for the main car companies in the U.S. market evolved over the last decade (from 1990 to 2000): All of the companies increased their carbon burdens by some degree or another. GM was the largest in 1990, and it's still the largest in 2000, and its carbon burden grew 13 percent over the decade, while the car market itself grew 28 percent.

But interestingly enough, over that decade Toyota posted the largest increase with its carbon burden. Historically a company with smaller products than the U.S. car companies, from 1990 to 2000 Toyota moved more heavily into SUVs and light trucks, and as a result Toyota's carbon burden grew by 72 percent. Toyota's relative growth in the carbon burden is by far the greatest of any company.

An interesting sub-note is, although Toyota has gotten a lot of environmental praise for coming out with the Prius, the world's first hybrid car - and that's certainly an encouraging accomplishment. But sales of Prius are still quite small, and Toyota unfortunately put much more of its resources into other aspects of its product line, while neglecting things like fuel economy. As a result, for Toyota to undo its growth in CO₂ emissions over the past decade, it would have to sell more than 10 times more hybrid vehicles than it is currently selling.

Q: Besides Toyota and Honda, which has introduced the hybrid Insight and Civic, do any other automakers have plans to introduce hybrids?

DeCicco: All of the big three of the U.S. have announced plans for hybrids -- the first one due to come out is from Ford Motor Co., a hybrid version of their Escape SUV next year. Ford has made some moves toward better environmental accountability, and two years ago made a pledge to raise fuel economy by 25 percent in its SUVs by 2005. But even though that is progress on the part of Ford, that pledge by itself is not even enough to make up for the adverse effects of that company's global warming pollution over the last decade.

Q: GM and Ford by far have the largest carbon burden in terms of new light vehicles sales in 2000 [Fig. 2, executive summary] -- so how does carbon burden correlate to vehicle sales (market share) and fuel economy?

DeCicco: GM and Ford have the largest carbon emissions because they have the largest market share and because they've not improved fuel economy of their vehicles, and that's really the main factor behind carbon emissions. In fact, fuel economy of all the automakers that we looked at in this report declined to a greater or lesser degree.

Q: So what automakers should strive for, then, is a proportionately lower carbon burden in relation to their market share?

DeCicco: That's right. If a company's carbon burden grows because they are growing their market share, that means the company is not paying enough attention to its responsibility for the environment; in short it's profiting at the expense of the environment. And so the right strategy for a company is to produce competitive products that help them gain or maintain their market share while cutting their carbon burden, and to do that they need to design vehicles with lower carbon CO₂ emissions and higher fuel economy.

Q: What is the main message you want to get across in this report?

DeCicco: The real take-home message is that to reduce automotive carbon burdens, fuel economy has to be improved across the board. The message to Toyota is that it's not enough to sell a few hybrid cars, that doesn't make up for the wrong direction it's been going in the last decade. Even Ford pledging to improve its SUV fuel economy is not enough to make up for its wrong direction over the last decade. Certainly if all companies were required to have their SUVs and light trucks meet the same standards as passenger cars that would be a significant step forward - but that too wouldn't be enough to control the problem. What really needs to be done is a lifting of all ships, so to speak - all cars, tucks, SUVs, minivans, pickups - to higher efficiency standards. That would lower CO₂ emissions to reduce the carbon burden in a significant way.

Q: In other words, there needs to be a comprehensive strategy, a multi-pronged approach - that is, we can't pin the blame on SUVs and light trucks for the carbon emissions problem or expect one simple solution?

DeCicco: That's right. The solution certainly needs to embrace SUVs and light trucks but also needs to cut across the whole market. The main point of this carbon burdens report is to put forward the idea of the bottom line for carbon burdens and environmental protection: for an automaker, it's not what kind of car you sell or whether it's a hybrid or not, but how many tons of carbon that vehicle going to be putting into the atmosphere over its life. When you roll out the millions of new vehicles this year, what have you done to reduce the carbon burden of those vehicles compared to the ones you sold last year? The real bottom line we want both car makers and policy makers to look at is tons of carbon emissions and how to reduce them.

The big auto companies have a huge pool of enormously talented engineers, designers and marketers at their disposal, and they can find ways to reduce the carbon burden. The real solution is to get them to use all that creativity they've been using for everything else besides lowering CO₂ emissions and instead channel it toward reducing the carbon burden from all their products.

By Leslie Valentine