After more than a year of wrangling, the new fuel economy and emissions standards that have emerged from the coordinated efforts of the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, all of the major automakers, environmental organizations, and dozens of various other stakeholders are truly an amazing accomplishment.

As my fellow Gas 2.0 contributor, Chris Demorro, said, it’s been a long time since we’ve made any changes to these CAFE regulations… and it’s long overdue.

But are electric cars being treated fairly in all of this?

By 2016 all automakers will be required to meet an average new car fleet fuel economy of 34.1 mpg. In practical terms this doesn’t mean that all cars will average 34.1 mpg, but that passenger cars will average something like 42 mpg while light trucks will average something like 28 mpg. And while those are pretty amazing numbers, the truly interesting story here is how the electric cars that any given manufacturer builds and sells will count towards their fleet fuel economy and emissions numbers.

Some manufacturers, such as Nissan, are banking on sales of electric cars to not only increase their bottom line and establish them as players in the auto landscape of the future, but to help them meet the new CAFE requirements without investing in research and development of completely new combustion vehicle platforms. So how the new CAFE requirements are set regarding EVs will have drastic long term effects on these pioneering carmakers.

According to the new rules, the first 200,000 electric cars that any manufacturer sells will count as zero emissions and essentially unlimited mpg vehicles towards that manufacturer’s CAFE credits. But, after a given manufacturer sells their 200,000 EV allotment, any further electric cars sold will then be assigned a pollution number based on how much carbon dioxide is released as a result of generating the electricity to power them.

But, as several writers have now pointed out, how could you possibly assign a straight carbon dioxide pollution number per kilowatt of electricity generated? One of the strengths of our electric grid is how diverse our electrical energy sources are. Some areas of the country run mostly off of coal power, but some places — like where I live in central Washington state — are powered almost entirely off of hydro. So you can see right away that coming up with some average amount of pollution per kilowatt of electricity for the entire United States would penalize some areas more than others.

While we can say that the average over the entire US is that 51% of our electrical grid is coal powered, 21% is nuclear powered, 17% is natural gas powered, 6.5% is hydro, and the remaining 4.5% is wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and petroleum, that is essentially just as meaningful as saying that in 2016 new car average fuel economy will be 34.1 mpg — and, as I said earlier, your actual mileage will be drastically lower or higher depending on what kind of vehicle you buy. Averages are useful only as a tool to help guide decisions, not as a constant to hang your hat on.

The problem becomes even more murky when you consider that the areas of the country to adopt EVs first (and likely hold onto a large lead for decades) — areas such as California, Oregon, and Washington — have some of the cleanest electric power in the entire country. So, to assign electric power generation pollution numbers to electric cars as if electric cars were being sold equally to all areas of the country simply does not make sense.

And, as Paul Scott (of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” fame) recently said on his personal blog, the amount of new wind power installed in the US last year alone was enough to power more than 7 million electric cars. Surely, as Paul points out, the increasing pace of wind, solar, geothermal and other zero emissions power installations in this country will be far more than enough to accommodate all electric cars sold here for decades to come — if not in perpetuity.

And, because Paul wrote it so elegantly and concisely, I’m just going to plop his text right in here:

“Lastly, and this is very important, if the EPA deigns it necessary to count the upstream pollution from generating the electricity, then by all rights it should count the upstream pollution from extracting, shipping, refining, and transporting the oil that competes with electricity. To cap it off, be sure to include the electricity used to pump it into the tank at the gas station. All of this energy use creates vast waste and massive pollution and absolutely should be accounted for. It’s called a level playing field, and it’s the American way!”

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve learned so much about how to implement regulations fairly across all sectors of the economy… and for something as far reaching and economy-wide as emissions we need to make sure we are treating every segment fairly.

Reprinted with permission from Gas 2.0