Big Changes With Little Fanfare: The FHWA Proposes to Use GHG Emissions as a Performance Measure

This week, the Federal Highway Administration issued a Noticed of Proposed Rulemaking to promulgate performance measures to be used in evaluating federal funding of transportation projects.  The requirement for performance measures stems from the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, aka MAP-21.  MAP-21 requires the FHWA to establish performance standards in 12 categories, one of which is “on-road mobile source emissions.”  MAP 21

The NPRM addresses this criterion, focusing largely on emissions of criteria pollutants.  However, buried in the 423-page NPRM is a six-page section labeled “Consideration of a Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measure.”

And thus the FHWA drops a bomb that could revolutionize federal funding of transportation projects.  It’s important to note that this may not happen.  If the next President is Republican, it certainly won’t.  Even if the FHWA goes forward, there would be legal challenges to its authority to use GHG as part of the performance measures.

If it does go forward though, it really would be revolutionary.  As the NPRM states, transportation sources are rapidly increasing as a source of GHG emissions:

GHG emissions from on-road sources represent approximately 23 percent of economy-wide GHGs, but have accounted for more than two-thirds of the net increase in total U.S. GHGs since 1990.

The enormity of both the challenges facing the FHWA in attempting to establish a performance measure for GHG emissions and the potential impact implementation of a GHG performance measure would have is reflected in some of the 13 questions that FHWA posed for comment:

  • Should the measure be limited to emissions coming from the tailpipe, or should it consider emissions generated upstream in the life cycle of the vehicle operations?
  • Should CO2 emissions performance be estimated based on gasoline and diesel fuel sales, system use (vehicle miles traveled), or other surrogates?
  • Would a performance measure on CO2 emissions help to improve transparency and to realign incentives such that State DOTs and MPOs are better positioned to meet national climate change goals?
  • How long would it take for transportation agencies to implement such a measure?

Welcome to the brave new world of integrated planning to manage GHG emissions in a critical sector of our economy.

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