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Britain’s Nuclear Plans at a Critical Point

March 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

But little has gone according to plan so far in this ambitious project, already more than four years behind schedule. Although envisioned as a big bet on Britain’s clean-energy future, the project has been bogged down in months of dickering between the British government and EDF Energy, the French state-controlled power company that is supposed to oversee construction and eventually operate the two plants in question.

EDF Energy, which already runs most of Britain’s aging fleet of nine nuclear power plants, is threatening to walk away from the project unless the government promises to guarantee a price for the electricity that is roughly double the current rate. With tens of billions of pounds and thousands of jobs riding on the deal, the issue might ultimately be decided at the highest reaches of the British and, possibly, French governments.

“This isn’t a decision about the price for one power station,” said Dieter Helm, a professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford. “This is about whether we want a nuclear industry or don’t we. That is the question. Only the politicians can decide.”

EDF Energy executives declined to comment for this article.

Mark Malbas, a spokesman for Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, which is leading the talks, declined to discuss the negotiations in detail, other than to say that they were continuing and that “we are focused on getting a fair deal for the consumer.”

Britain had been counting on nuclear energy as a big part of the effort to meet its commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by the mid-2020s. Originally, planners had called for five or so new nuclear plants to be up and running by 2025. But with even the first of those new plants not yet under construction, the risk is that as Britain closes down its older nuclear stations — which generate about 20 percent of the country’s electricity, at very low cost — there will not be new ones to replace them.

“It will be a big setback for British energy policy if these negotiations break down,” said Tim Yeo, a conservative who is chairman of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.

Britain’s nuclear ambitions already received a big setback last year, when two big German utilities, RWE and E.On, decided not to proceed with construction of a plant that had been planned for Wales. The companies cited the costs and the uncertainties of getting a return on their investment.

The EDF plan calls for a plant with two nuclear reactors to be built on a headland called Hinkley Point overlooking the Severn Estuary in southwest England. Already, earthmovers in recent months have been carving away at a hillside there. If the green light is given, that soil will be trucked into the next valley as part of a gargantuan project that is expected to create 25,000 construction jobs.

The site — 175 hectares, or about 430 acres — is just south of a 1970s-vintage nuclear station known as Hinkley Point B, which is operated by EDF. And looming over the fields are the eerie-looking boxy shells of two even older, 1960s-era reactors that have been shut down for more than a decade but still employ a couple of hundred people in the decommissioning.

EDF executives say they have already spent £1 billion, or about $1.5 billion, getting to the “shovel-ready” point for the new plants. After years of study, Britain’s nuclear and environmental regulators have approved designs, and about 70 percent of the necessary contracts are already lined up and ready to be signed. If and when the new plant, Hinkley Point C, comes fully online, it will supply about 7 percent of Britain’s electricity. That would be enough power to meet the needs of five million homes, with the added benefit of no carbon emissions.

On Tuesday, Edward Davey, Britain’s energy and climate change minister, is expected to announce the final decision on whether Hinkley Point construction can begin. It would be a moot announcement, though, if EDF does not agree to proceed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of an Investec analyst. He is Harold Hutchinson, not Hopkinson.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/business/energy-environment/britains-nuclear-plans-at-a-critical-point.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Special Report: Business of Green: Carbon Capture and Storage Plans in Europe Face Doubts

January 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Two carbon capture and storage projects in Germany and Britain were canceled last quarter, and many of the remaining projects will probably share that fate this year, imperiled by a mix of regulatory objections, a lack of money, public opposition to the possible geological risks and broader uncertainty about strategies to slow climate change.

By 2020, Europe will have at most six, and more probably four, of the 12 demonstration plants that were supposed to be running by 2015, experts and officials say.

“The program will deliver four to six projects, tops, and some say that’s optimistic,” said Eric Drosin, a spokesman of Zero Emissions Platform, an umbrella group representing private and public partners involved in carbon capture and storage, also known as C.C.S.

Christoph Weber, an expert on low-carbon economy and a professor of management sciences and energy economics at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, said Europe “would have to spend a lot more money than projected initially to get utilities to say that the business is not the best, but worth going for.”

Still, Europe, an early leader in developing the technology for use outside the oil industry — which injects carbon dioxide into aging oil fields to bolster production — remains bound by its climate change targets. Delayed deployment of the technology could make it significantly more expensive to meet a target, agreed on by heads of state in 2009, to cut greenhouse gas emissions at least 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. It would also increase dependence on nuclear power, a tall order given Germany’s rejection of nuclear energy.

“There is no long-term role for fossil fuels in Europe’s future energy mix unless C.C.S. is deployed,” the European Union’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, warned last month.

Spain could be a case study of failed ambitions. It is one of Europe’s worst laggards in the pursuit of carbon dioxide emission targets, and Spaniards as a whole do not share the concerns voiced in some countries about the geological security of the technology. The country also has mainstream political support for revitalizing its coal industry and a more stable regulatory framework than many of its neighbors.

In 2006 the government set up the Fundación Ciudad de la Energía, known as Ciuden, a research facility in the Bierzo, a mountainous coal mining region of northwestern Spain.

Ciuden was to develop a technology for collecting waste carbon dioxide from the burning of local coal, cooling it to a liquid and pumping it for indefinite storage into underground caves or porous rock formations.

Three years later, along with two private partners, it received a grant for 180 million euros, or $228 million, to build a pilot plant, to be followed by an industrial-scale plant for completion by 2015.

But the demonstration plant is now unofficially mothballed for lack of committed public and private money. Endesa, one of the biggest utilities in Spain, which was to build a 500-megawatt coal-burning power generator integrating Ciuden’s technology, has said it will not make any formal decision on the project until later this year.

An industry ministry spokesman in Spain’s new conservative government said the company had shown little interest in pursuing the program and the government itself had yet to make up its mind what to do.

The former Socialist Party administration, meanwhile, was scarcely more active. Despite the debt crisis, it subsidized the renewable energy industry with nearly 7 billion euros in 2011, most of it directed to solar power, but it provided no more money for the demonstration project.

Adding carbon capture technology to a power plant raises the capital cost by 30 to 100 percent, according to the Global C.C.S. Institute, an Australian government research center created to share global knowledge about the technology. That translates into an average of 1 billion to 2 billion euros, depending on the size of the plant. The technology also makes plants less efficient, reducing power output 20 percent.

Yet the technology continues to enjoy political and financial support in many countries, including Norway, the United States, Australia and Canada, as economies strive to mitigate climate change without sacrificing the reliability and affordability of fossil fuels, especially coal.

The United States has four operational projects, with three more under construction and 18 planned; and Canada has one operational and two under construction, with three awaiting final decisions and three in the planning stage.

The 2050 Energy Roadmap, adopted by the European Commission last month, looks to carbon capture for 19 to 32 percent of total European Union emission cuts by 2050.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0abd7baecbb825e976e2156cdb78c219

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Court Upholds Europe’s Plan to Charge Airlines for Carbon Emissions

December 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — The European Union’s highest court on Wednesday endorsed a plan to begin charging the world’s biggest airlines for their greenhouse gas emissions from Jan. 1, setting the stage for a potentially costly trade war with the United States, China and other countries.

A group of United States airlines had argued that forcing them to participate in the bloc’s potentially costly emissions-trading program infringed on national sovereignty and conflicted with existing international aviation treaties.

But in its ruling, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg affirmed an opinion issued in October by its advocate general, who had rejected their claim.

The court’s decision comes amid increasing pressure from some of the biggest trading partners of the 27-member bloc to suspend or amend application of the legislation to expressly exclude non-E.U. countries — at least initially. Failing that, several governments have vowed to take their own legal action or retaliate with countervailing trade measures.

Initially at least, airlines will receive most of the permits they will need for free. Ticket prices could rise by as much as €12, or nearly $16, on some long-haul flights to cover the cost of additional permits, according to the E.U.

Carriers, however, are worried that the cost of compliance could rise sharply in coming years if governments decide airlines must buy a larger proportion of their permits — and if rising demand for the permits forces up the price.

In a letter dated Dec. 16 that was seen by the International Herald Tribune this week, Hillary Clinton, the United States secretary of state, and Ray LaHood, secretary of transportation, said Washington would be “compelled to take appropriate action” if Brussels proceeds, though the letter did not specify what form that might take.

“We strongly urge the E.U. and its member states within their respective competences to reconsider this current course,” the American officials wrote.

The United States House of Representatives approved a bill this year that would bar American carriers from participating in the system. A similar bill was introduced this month in the Senate.

China has also made known its displeasure with the European directive. This year it threatened to suspend purchases of new jets made by the European manufacturer Airbus if Chinese airlines were included. A group of Chinese carriers has also threatened to bring a lawsuit, possibly in Germany, where the authorities will oversee the application of the system to several Chinese airlines.

Experts say the Chinese could argue that the European law violates the Kyoto climate agreement by requiring airlines from developing nations, which are exempt from emissions cuts under the treaty, to bear the same burdens as carriers from wealthier nations.

Algeria has already begun a case in France contesting the system, according to the Arab Air Carriers Organization, an industry group that includes the country’s main carrier, Air Algérie.

Exempting foreign airlines, however, would raise hackles among European carriers that would still be obliged to participate.

“European airlines and the European economy must not get caught in the political cross fire, or be put at a competitive disadvantage,” Mike Ambrose, director general of the European Regions Airline Association said in a statement. “If these tensions erupt into full-scale trade conflict, there will be no winners — least of all the environment.”

The European initiative involves folding aviation into the Union’s six-year-old Emissions Trading System, in which polluters can buy and sell a limited quantity of permits, each representing a ton of carbon dioxide. The legislation mandates that all airlines account for their emissions for the entirety of any flight that takes off from — or lands at — any airport in the 27-member bloc.

The goal, Brussels has said, is to speed up the adoption of greener technologies at a time when air traffic, which represents about 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, is growing much faster than gains in efficiency.

Governments and airlines have been in negotiations for more than a decade over the creation of global cap-and-trade system under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations. The I.C.A.O.’s 190 member states passed a resolution in 2010 committing the group to devising a market-based solution, though without a fixed timetable.

Impatient with the pace of the I.C.A.O. talks, the European Commission moved ahead with its own plan, which was passed two years ago with the backing of national governments and the European Parliament.

At an I.C.A.O. meeting last month, 26 member states, including China, Russia and the United States, formally signaled their dissatisfaction with the European system — a sign that they could push for a formal dispute procedure at the organization.

European officials have said repeatedly they would prefer a multi-lateral solution and that Brussels is prepared to amend its cap-and-trade system if and when the I.C.A.O. reaches a global aviation emissions agreement.

The case decided Wednesday began when the industry group Air Transport Association of America (since renamed Airlines for America) and three major airlines — United and Continental, which merged last year, and American — complained about the E.U. legislation at the High Court in London in 2009.

The parties argued that the law conflicted with existing aviation treaties and a swath of other agreements and principles. The British court then referred the case to the European court for a preliminary ruling.

In the wake of the court’s finding, the case will now revert back to the British court, which is likely to echo the European ruling.

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/global/court-upholds-europes-plan-to-charge-airlines-for-carbon-emissions.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Court Adviser Backs E.U. Plan to Compel Airlines to Pay for Carbon Emissions

October 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

BRUSSELS — The European Union won a preliminary victory Thursday for its plan to charge the world’s biggest airlines for their greenhouse gas emissions even as international opposition to the plan grew fiercer and support among European countries weakened.

The opinion by the advocate general at the European Court of Justice strongly endorsed the E.U. push to include global airlines in its Emissions Trading System. The system already covers other heavy industries and represents the Union’s boldest step yet to lead the world in efforts to control climate change.

The opinion also dealt a significant blow to the global airline industry’s effort to avoid being required, starting Jan. 1, to become part of a system that it argues will be ineffective in cutting carbon emissions and lead to higher ticket prices.

The Air Transport Association of America, which brought the case with three major U.S. airlines, said it was disappointed, but that the opinion “does not mark the end of the case.” It said the final opinion still could “vary from the preliminary opinion.” The International Air Transport Association, a global industry body, said so many countries were now opposed to the measures that the Union should drop its plans and restart talks on how to regulate greenhouse gases from aviation at a global level.

“Rather than risking a further escalation of tensions amongst states, I encourage Europe to support a successful, global and effective solution,” said Tony Tyler, the director general of the I.A.T.A.

Mr. Tyler said that more than 20 countries — including India, China, Japan, the United States and Russia — signed a declaration last week vowing to challenge the plan at the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations.

The I.C.A.O.’s 190 member states passed a resolution in 2010 committing themselves to devising a market-based solution, though without a fixed timetable. Impatient with the pace of the I.C.A.O. talks, the European Union moved ahead with its own plan.

Fitch, the ratings agency, warned this week that the issue had the potential to “escalate into a wider international trade dispute, as airlines and governments grow more vocal over the regulation’s economic impact.”

The case was brought by three U.S. airlines — United and Continental, which merged last year, and American Airlines — and the A.T.A. The parties argued that Europe’s decision infringed on the sovereignty of other countries and conflicted with existing international aviation treaties.

On Thursday, the court’s legal adviser, Juliane Kokott, rejected those arguments.

“E.U. legislation does not infringe the sovereignty of other states or the freedom of the high seas guaranteed under international law and is compatible with the relevant international agreements,” Ms. Kokott wrote.

She also wrote that any flight touching down or taking off from an E.U. airport provided “an adequate territorial link for the whole of the flight in question to be included in the E.U. emissions trading scheme.”

The opinion is not binding on the judges, but the court follows the advocate general’s opinion in the vast majority of cases. A final ruling is expected in the coming months.

The system is due to take effect next year, and the airlines would not have to hand over the first batches of permits until the spring of 2013 to compensate for flights made in 2012. That still could leave room for a compromise over the next year.

The emissions rules were approved by the 27 member countries of the European Union in 2008 and were designed to make airlines speed up adoption of greener technologies at a time when air traffic, which represents about 3 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, is growing much faster than efficiency gains.

But it emerged on Thursday that the mounting international opposition had sown doubts at least two European countries about the wisdom of going forward with the system.

The Dutch state secretary for infrastructure and the environment, Joop Atsma, had become “very worried about the external resistance in other countries,” his spokeswoman, Karin van Rooijen, said Thursday.

Mr. Atsma “is not against the system,” she said. “But if other European countries think the situation is bad, he is considering supporting a postponement.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2e4d8a0738cf846279c137966d063d03

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Japan Quake Is Causing Costly Shift to Fossil Fuels

August 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“They asked me how long it would take,” said Masatake Koseki, head of the Yokosuka plant, which is 40 miles south of Tokyo and run by Tokyo Electric. “The facilities are old, so I told them six months. But they said, ‘No, you must ready them by summer to prepare for an energy shortage.’ ”

Now, at summer’s peak, Yokosuka’s two fuel-oil and two gas turbines are cranking out a total of 900,000 kilowatts of electricity — and an abundance of fumes.

The generators are helping to replace the 400 million kilowatt-hours of daily electricity production lost this summer because of the shutdown of all but 15 of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Across the country, dozens of other fossil-fuel plants have been fired up, and Japan is importing billions of dollars worth of liquefied natural gas, coal and oil to keep them running.

Japan, the world’s third-largest user of electricity behind China and the United States, had counted on an expansion of nuclear power to contain energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, its nuclear program is in retreat, as the public and government officials urge a sharp reduction in the nation’s reliance on nuclear power and perhaps an end to it altogether.

As its nuclear program implodes, Japan is grappling with a jump in fuel costs, making an economic recovery from the March earthquake and tsunami all the more difficult. Annual fuel expenses could rise by more than 3 trillion yen, or about $39 billion, the government says.

The country, until recently a vocal proponent of measures to curb climate change, is also leaving a bigger carbon footprint. According to government calculations, Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions could rise by as much as 210 million metric tons, or 16 percent, by 2013 from 1990 levels if its nuclear reactors were shut permanently. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, Japan promised to reduce its emissions by 6 percent over that period.

“Can nuclear be eliminated?” asked Adam Schatzker, an energy analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “It’s possible, but very costly.”

If necessary, Japan could replace the energy capacity lost in the shutdown of its nuclear fleet by increasing the use of natural gas and coal, Mr. Schatzker said. “But even if fossil fuel facilities can make up for the loss of nuclear, it would likely take time, cost a great deal more money and pollute significantly,” he said.

For resource-poor Japan, it is an energy shift of an unprecedented scale and speed. A generation ago, the oil shock of 1973, which exposed the country’s overdependence on Middle Eastern oil, forced Japanese companies to focus on energy efficiency and prompted the government to invest heavily in nuclear power.

But as it doubled down on nuclear power plants, Japan was slow to develop alternative forms of energy, like solar or wind power, which account for just 1 percent of its electricity supply.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called for a gradual move away from nuclear energy, and proposed a goal of generating 20 percent of Japan’s electricity from renewable sources, including hydroelectric plants, by the early 2020s. The Parliament is debating legislation to spur that change.

A nuclear-free future could come much sooner, however. Nervous local governments have blocked the restart of reactors idled for routine inspections, which occur every 13 months. If no reactors can restart, Japan’s entire nuclear fleet, which provided 30 percent of its electricity in 2009, could be closed by spring.

The shutdowns are already causing an energy squeeze. At least three utilities have come close to full capacity during peak demand hours this summer. The government has warned that eastern Japan, including Tokyo, could face an electricity shortage of about 10 percent next summer if no nuclear plants are running.

A 10 percent shortage may not be disastrous. This summer, for example, a major energy-saving drive by households and companies drove down peak electricity demand in July by about 20 percent, to 46.3 million kilowatts, averting blackouts despite the energy shortfall, according to Tokyo Electric, the operator of the stricken Fukushima plant.

Still, “we take this situation very seriously,” Toshio Nishizawa, chief executive of Tokyo Electric, said this month. Only three of the company’s 17 nuclear reactors are running.

A protracted increase in fossil fuel costs is possible to make up for the shortfall, traders say.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/business/energy-environment/quake-in-japan-is-causing-a-costly-shift-to-fossil-fuels.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Utility Shelves Ambitious Plan to Limit Carbon

July 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

American Electric Power has decided to table plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant at Mountaineer, a 31-year-old coal-fired plant in West Virginia, where the company has successfully captured and buried carbon dioxide in a small pilot program for two years.

The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

Company officials, who plan an announcement on Thursday, said they were dropping the larger, $668 million project because they did not believe state regulators would let the company recover its costs by charging customers, thus leaving it no compelling regulatory or business reason to continue the program.

The federal Department of Energy had pledged to cover half the cost, but A.E.P. said it was unwilling to spend the remainder in a political climate that had changed strikingly since it began the project.

“We are placing the project on hold until economic and policy conditions create a viable path forward,” said Michael G. Morris, chairman of American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest operators of coal-fired generating plants in the United States. He said his company and other coal-burning utilities were caught in a quandary: they need to develop carbon-capture technology to meet any future greenhouse-gas emissions rules, but they cannot afford the projects without federal standards that will require them to act and will persuade the states to allow reimbursement.

The decision could set back for years efforts to learn how best to capture carbon emissions that result from burning fossil fuels and then inject them deep under-ground to keep them from accumulating in the atmosphere and heating the planet. The procedure, formally known as carbon capture and sequestration or C.C.S., offers the best current technology for taming greenhouse-gas emissions from traditional fuels burned at existing plants.

The abandonment of the A.E.P. plant comes in response to a string of reversals for federal climate change policy. President Obama spent his first year in office pushing a goal of an 80 percent reduction in climate-altering emissions by 2050, a target that could be met only with widespread adoption of carbon-capture and storage at coal plants around the country. The administration’s stimulus package provided billions of dollars to speed development of the technology; the climate change bill passed by the House in 2009 would have provided tens of billions of dollars in additional incentives for what industry calls “clean coal.”

But all such efforts collapsed last year with the Republican takeover of the House and the continuing softness in the economy, which killed any appetite for far-reaching environmental measures.

A senior Obama administration official said that the A.E.P. decision was a direct result of the political stalemate.

“This is what happens when you don’t get a climate bill,” the official said, insisting on anonymity to discuss a corporate decision that had not yet been publicly announced.

At the Energy Department, Charles McConnell, the acting assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy, said no carbon legislation was near and unless there was a place to sell the carbon dioxide, utilities would have great difficulties in justifying the expense. “You could have the debate all day long about whether people are enlightened about whether carbon dioxide should be sequestered,” he said. But, he added, “it’s not a situation that is going to promote investment.”

His department has pledged more than $3 billion to other industrial plants to encourage the capture of carbon dioxide for sale to oil drillers, who use it to more easily get crude out of wells.

The West Virginia project was one of the most advanced and successful in the world. “While the coal industry’s commitment and ability to develop this technology on a large scale was always uncertain, the continued pollution from old-style, coal-fired power plants will certainly be damaging to the environment without the installation of carbon capture and other pollution control updates,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, co-author of the House climate bill. “A.E.P., the American coal industry and the Republicans who blocked help for this technology have done our economy and energy workers a disservice by likely ceding the development of carbon-capture technology to countries like China.”

A.E.P., which serves five million customers in 11 states, operated a pilot-scale capture plant at its Mountaineer generating station in New Haven, W.Va., on the Ohio River, from 2009 until May of this year. But the company plans to announce on Thursday that it will complete early engineering studies and then will suspend the project indefinitely.

Public service commissions of both West Virginia and Virginia turned down the company’s request for full reimbursement for the pilot plant. West Virginia said earlier this year that the cost should have been shared among all the states where A.E.P. does business; Virginia hinted last July that it should have been paid for by all utilities around the United States, since a successful project would benefit all of them.

Five years ago, when global warming ranked higher on the national political agenda, the consensus was that this decade would be one of research and demonstration in new technologies. A comprehensive 2007 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that global coal use was inevitable and that the ensuing few years should be used to quickly find ways to burn the cheap, abundant fuel cleanly. But with the demise of the Mountaineer project, the United States, the largest historic emitter of global warming gases, now appears to have made little progress solving the problem.

Robert H. Socolow, an engineering professor at Princeton and the co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative there, said he was encouraged that some chemical factories and other industries were working on carbon capture without government incentives.

Mr. Socolow, the co-author of an influential 2004 paper that identified carbon capture as one of the critical technologies needed to slow global warming, said that there was a trap ahead. “Lull yourself into believing that there is no climate problem, or that there is lots of time to fix it, and the policy driver dissolves,” he said in an e-mail. He added that for companies like A.E.P., “business wants to be ahead of the curve, but not a lap ahead.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/business/energy-environment/utility-shelves-plan-to-capture-carbon-dioxide.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hybrid Owners Look to Extend Carpool Privilege

May 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

SAN FRANCISCO — Virtue may be its own reward, but incentives don’t hurt. In California in 2004, when the country’s first measure restricting vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions became law, 75,000 owners of the gas-stingiest hybrid cars were assured access to carpool lanes.

Now the $8 yellow decal that served as a get-out-of-traffic-free card is about to become meaningless: the privilege, originally set to expire in 2008,  was legislatively extended twice, and now ends July 1. 

But the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic drivers who got the coveted decals — 10,000 more were added a couple of years later — are finding it hard to accept the idea that they are not as special as they once were.

“It’s so California,” said Fran Pavley, a state senator who sponsored the original measure as an assemblywoman seven years ago, as she tried to describe the aggrieved response to the change. “It’s not quite like taking away your firstborn,” she added. “But it’s right up there for anyone who spends time on the freeway.”

Her district includes Santa Monica and Malibu, where 3 percent of all cars are hybrids — the greatest concentration in the state. Los Angeles County, whose freeways of molasses have contributed to pop song lyrics and hospital asthma admissions, is home to 27,227 of the yellow-stickered hybrids, almost one-third of the state total.

The lobbying for an extension of the carpool lane privileges is unlikely to bear fruit, said Ms. Pavley, a Democrat who drives a Prius but has no sticker.

John Burton, a former leader of the State Senate, called Ms. Pavley to push for the extension, because vehicles that qualify for a new (green) sticker program do not go on sale until next year. Mr. Burton, now chairman of the state Democratic Party, has a yellow-stickered car, qualifying him to shave many minutes off the 90-minute drive between his home in San Francisco and the Capitol in Sacramento. But the time he saved, he said, is “honest to God not that big a deal.”

Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied hybrid owners, said they were “a mixture of people wanting to signal their virtuousness and people wanting to get to work quickly.”

In the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, where all hybrids are given carpool lane privileges, the number of hybrids is nearly double that in the Maryland suburbs, where they have no special status. Within the Virginia suburbs, Prince William County, which is farther from the area’s work hubs, has the highest proportion of hybrids, said Nicholas Ramfos, a transportation specialist with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

In Sacramento, Ms. Pavley’s staff is considering changing her phone number as of July 1, when the yellow-stickered cars must rejoin the noncarpool plebeians. “Maybe we need to get people counseling,” she said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=21f0e6bc332817dce87ff976eaf6c84f

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