The Obama administration recently granted California the right to enforce its first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks, after announcing plans in May to boost federal fuel efficiency standards.  Thirteen other states will also implement the California emissions standard until 2012 when the U.S. government will adopt the California standards as federal law. 

The move will collectively slash emissions by 30 percent in 2016.

But California’s long overdue victory on emissions standards didn’t come without a protracted legal and public relations effort by the auto industry, which spent untold millions (billions?) trying to derail the California Clean Car program that would reduce global warming pollution from cars and trucks.

When government officials bow to lobbyists it's business as usual, when government officials do the work of the lobbyist, it's borderline scandalous. Internal government documents released today show that lobbying in Washington has gotten much easier for auto manufacturers, with government officials doing it for them.

Email correspondence obtained by Rep. Henry Waxman, Chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee shows current Bush Administration appointees heading up a lobbying effort against California's application to implement their own motor vehicle standards.

According to Waxman, the effort was personally directed by the Bush-appointed Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, apparently approved by the Chief of Staff in the White House Council on Environmental Quality and coordinated by the auto industry.

Copies of the emails are attached at the bottom of this post.

It seems that auto industry greenwashing is not just a North American phenomenon.

Like most international sports, the Europeans seem to always be one step ahead. And when it comes to the sleazy sport of greenwashing and delay tactics, the European autolobby has been at it for a lot longer and has developed much more skill than their American counterparts.

In the auto industry, there’s one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.

From the New Yorker:

A few years later, when Congress was thinking about requiring fuel-economy standards, auto executives warned that instituting such standards would create '“massive financial and unemployment problems.' And now, with Congress debating a bill to raise fuel-economy standards, for the first time in almost twenty years, the Chicken Littles are squawking again, forecasting doom for Detroit and asserting that making higher-mileage vehicles is technologically unfeasible and economically suicidal."

"There are 11 million alternative fuel autos on the road today," exclaims The Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers (AAM) website.

The AAM has a long history of fighting emission standards, so it's no wonder why a headline like "11 million alternative fuel autos on the road today" would jump out at anyone familiar with the Alliance and their not-so-environmentally friendly activities.

For those of you haven’t seen the film Who Killed the Electric Car, the premise is quite simple and by the looks of things, it’s a premise that could repeat itself in the next decade or so.

While big automakers, like Ford, Toyota and GM hang a “hybrid plug-in” carrot in front of our collective nose, they’re fighting tooth and nail in California, and elsewhere, against stricter greenhouse gas emission standards for new vehicles.