The Pernicious Price of Petroleum

Wired Magazine
By John Gartner
02:00 AM Dec, 13, 2006

Our love of driving is killing us. While we think of car crashes as causing fatalities, the production and transportation of fuel also significantly undermines public health.

In his book Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction, Terry Tamminen outlines the direct and indirect impact that petroleum consumption has on millions of Americans every year.

Tamminen, a former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, spoke with Wired News about how we got into this mess, who is to blame, and his state's current efforts to hold energy providers and the auto industry responsible for their environmental impact.

Wired News: How many casualties do petroleum products cause each year?

Terry Tamminen: Nationally about 100,000 people die every year from preventable air pollution, and another 6.5 million go to the hospital with respiratory and other diseases related to smog and polluted air. But that's probably just the tip of the iceberg, as many people die of heart disease or heart attacks caused by hearts or lungs strained by air pollution and restricted airways.

People outside of the U.S. also pay for our oil addiction because of the damage done to their environment at the sites where oil is drilled. There are entire villages where the tribes were decimated because there was virtually no environmental regulation, and oil pipelines broke and huge fires swept up communities.

Also, many people die in conflicts over oil rights as local rebels and warlords fight to get oil companies out of these places through kidnappings and terrorism. And then there's the military lives we expend when trying to protect our oil interests in places like Iraq.

WN: You pin most of the blame on the auto and oil companies for polluting our skies, but aren't we free to choose our vehicles and how we use them?

Tamminen: We are not blameless as we do ... drive cars when we could walk or take a bike. But consumers haven't really had a choice because they didn't have accurate information about the health risks. Much like the tobacco industry responded to pressure from regulators about the dangers of smoking by forming the Tobacco Institute, the automobile industry formed an alliance to study the health impact of their products, but it was really an organization created to produce bogus studies and conspire to hide the truth.

The auto industry worked to stall the science that could reduce pollution by saying that it was too expensive or technically impossible. This delayed the introduction of catalytic converters and the removal of leaded gasoline and has kept the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards from changing. Today we continue to overpay in "lives per gallon" because the auto industry pushes high octane gasoline which requires more energy to produce but provides no benefit to most of the vehicles on the road.

Consumer choice has been reduced by companies including General Motors, Standard Oil (which later became ExxonMobil) and Firestone Tires, which conspired to eliminate the clean electric trains that were being used for mass transit around the country. During the 1940s and 1950s, these companies created the National City Lines, a shell company that bought up the local clean electric transit systems and tore up the tracks so that no one else could ever use them. The companies replaced the trains with dirty diesel buses and encouraged people to buy cars. The group was eventually found guilty in federal court for anti-trust violations, but it was too late to do anything about it.

WN: Are there auto or petroleum companies that stand out as being either more or less responsible for the damage to public health?

Tamminen: As I've said, GM has historically been a bad actor. Currently in California the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers is trying to block CA 1493 that requires the California Air Resources Board to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Honda is the only major auto manufacturer that did not join the lawsuit.

This past summer in California there was a summit with Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger and Prime Minister Tony Blair of England and 30 CEOs from around the world regarding reducing greenhouse gases, and it was encouraging that Shell and BP are embracing the idea. Chevron and ExxonMobil have been noticeably absent in the discussion of reducing greenhouse gases and led the fight against the failed Proposition 87, which would have created a tax on oil profits that would be invested in alternative energy. Shell and BP were not part of that consortium, so some actors are worse, and some are better.

WN: Plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles are touted as being more environmentally friendly. Is using natural gas and coal to generate the necessary electricity worthwhile from a health perspective?

Tamminen: When doing the "well to wheel" analysis, there is an enormous quantity of energy to extract oil and turn it into anything useful, transporting it, and getting it into your car, and we are going to have to work even harder to get oil in the future. Coal-fired electricity or hydrogen is cleaner and safer, because you don't have to go anywhere else in the world or kill anyone to get it. There are a lot of problems with coal, don't get me wrong, but I don't remember any time when coal has landed on a beach and killed birds and fish and destroyed entire economies.

WN: You support the recent lawsuit in California that asks for damages from automakers for their vehicles' greenhouse gas emissions. Couldn't the auto companies use the defense that they were always in compliance with the regulations of the state's Environmental Protection Agency?

Tamminen: Regulators can't regulate when they are consistently lied to and when alternatives are taken off the market. The auto companies were sued by California's attorney general for creating a nuisance. State and federal nuisance laws say you have the right to abate a nuisance. For example, if you live next to restaurant and the smoke from the grill comes streaming into your window, which may be totally legal but still creating a nuisance. For car companies, we know that it is possible to abate this nuisance.