Lately, there has been a lot of anti-Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) sentiment in California media. Certain voices are repeatedly and uncritically given big megaphones to tout naked ideology wrapped in an ‘expert’ mantle.

The idea here is not to provide another platform for ideology, but rather, to simply lay bare the bogus argument and illuminate the fundamental thing that the loudest current opponents of the LCFS amendments—very conveniently—do not say.

The inaccurate base claims go like this. First, the amendments give TOO MANY fuels the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions in transportation. Second, it will make the program too expensive for consumers.

Setting aside the embedded disinformation for a future blog, those two things are inherently contradictory.

An important concept from Economics 101 is the value of market competition. In this case, the more flexibility built into the LCFS program, the more sources and types of cleaner fuels that can play a role in decarbonizing transportation, the cheaper the program overall and the lower the resulting impact on California drivers.

The California Air Resources Board explicitly analyzed the potential economic effect as part of the current rulemaking. This analysis has somehow been ignored in the barrage of Strum und Drang of media coverage. As I previously outlined, a more restrictive approach as proposed by opponents of the package results in not only higher costs, but fewer carbon emissions reductions, higher health costs, and more use of petroleum-based fuels.

One can believe that the program should be more restrictive and/or favor particular fuels for ideological or any other reasons, but in the interest of transparency (and basic integrity), one must also acknowledge the relatively higher cost and likelihood of consumer impacts in the trade off.

We—and the LCFS program—cannot have it both ways.