As we launch into the 2009 Minnesota state legislative session, talks of the budget crunch continue to dominate. However, last week’s Minnesota Environmental Partnership (MEP) legislative forum provided a number of key legislators the opportunity to talk about some important policy issues that have a good chance of finding their way through the capitol and to the Governor’s desk this year:

• House Speaker Margaret Anderson-Kelliher reminded the crowd that it is more important than ever to safeguard environmental protections and funding, and to continue to prioritize the care of Minnesota’s natural resources for future generations.
• Senate Minority Leader Senator David Senjem said the four priorities on MEP’s list (Clean Cars, Sensible Communities, Safe Mines, and Safeguarding Investments) are all non-partisan issues and make sense for the entire legislature to get behind and support.

Hopefully this spirit of cooperation and commitment will continue well into the 2009 session.

However, in the event that our priority bills do not simply sail through the legislature (and let’s be honest, when does that ever happen?), it’s good to look to trusted Minnesota institutions to help support our positions. There are three transportation-related policies (Clean Cars, Building Sensible Communities, and a Low Carbon Fuels Policy) being introduced this session that will help create more and better options for how Minnesotans get around, in addition to significantly reducing global warming emissions and other air pollutants from the transportation sector. In June 2008, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) released a report detailing how combining these three transportation strategies will help Minnesota meet the greenhouse gas emissions goals put into statute with the passage of the Next Generation Energy Act of 2007. In their executive summary, CTS researchers found that the best ways to meet Minnesota’s 2015 and 2025 global warming emissions reduction goals in the transportation sector are:

1. Adopting the Clean Cars standards for cars and light duty trucks. Depending on the year adopted, the Clean Cars policy can achieve 60-80 percent of Minnesota’s global warming reduction goals in the transportation sector.
2. Adopting a Low Carbon Fuels Policy in Minnesota will meet about 27 percent of the 2015 transportation goal and 40 percent in 2025.
3. Decreasing vehicle miles driven (similar to what is proposed in the Building Sensible Communities bill) will reduce emissions up to 14 percent of the 2025 transportation goal.

Clearly the number-one thing Minnesota can do to cost-effectively reduce emissions from the transportation sector is to drive innovation and adopt the Clean Cars standards in 2009, but all of these strategies are critical to meeting our goals. So let’s get busy and get them all done this session! Contact your legislators today!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 11:04 am by Fresh Energy and is filed under Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.