The U.S. House of Representatives passed an energy bill today that includes significant provisions for standards on clean energy. The bill easily attained the number of votes required to pass in the house. The bill now moves to the Senate where we expect that it will take some work for this to be passed on to the President.

There are two issues that are contentious in this legislation. Understanding what these issues are also requires an understanding of the acronyms you are likely to hear when these are referred to in the mass media. CAFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Current standards require that U.S. automakers produce cars with an average fuel economy of 27.5 miles per gallon (MPG). The bill passed today requires that automobiles average 35 MPG by 2020. RPS is another term you are likely to hear a lot of in the coming months. RPS stands for renewable portfolio standard. An RPS is a requirement to generate a certain percentage of electricity from sources deemed ‘renewable’ by the governing authority.

Opposition to the new CAFE standards is coming from politicians who feel that the new standard is overly aggressive and will place an undue financial burden on auto makers who must redesign their vehicles in order to meet the new standards. The RPS issue is a bit more complicated. Many states are instituting their own RPS and a federal standard would take power away from state commissions who are investing quite a bit of effort into local standards. The other issue is that a ‘one size fits all approach’ to the RPS could penalize states that don’t have as much access to renewable sources of energy like wind and hydro.

You can find out more about CAFE standards by visiting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. You can find our more about state level RPS guidelines at the Renewable Energy Policy Project.