May 10--ORONO -- Vehicle buyers in Maine might agonize over prices, financing and whether to rust-proof the undercarriage, but they don't place a high priority on what comes out of the tailpipe.

Recent federal statistics indicate that pollution from cars and trucks is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions that America contributes to the global climate change problem.

Yet most Mainers still fail to see a link between their morning commute and the melting polar ice caps, said Jonathan Rubin, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at the University of Maine and one of the authors of a recent study looking into how consumers choose their vehicles.

"People need to understand that it's not some anonymous corporation that's at fault," Rubin said. "Making that connection between their own behavior and air pollution is the first step." To that end, Rubin -- working in cooperation with other UMaine faculty, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, Natural Resources Council of Maine and Maine Automobile Dealers Association -- recently surveyed 58 Mainers who had purchased a vehicle in the past two years.

The focus groups, held in Portland, Orono and Lewiston-Auburn, confirmed Rubin's suspicions -- consumers weren't buying "clean" cars because they didn't realize they could make a difference, he said.

Many participants said they trusted federal environmental standards and assumed that the rules ensured that all modern cars "pollute about the same." But federal standards vary by automobile class, so a perfectly legal sport utility vehicle produces many times more air pollution than a sedan that just meets federal emissions standards.

Others said they believed Maine has no air quality problem, or that all of the state's air pollution is imported from industry elsewhere. It's true that a great deal of pollution does come to Maine from the New York to Connecticut corridor, and from Midwestern power plants. But according to DEP figures, the biggest source of air pollution is the Boston to Portland metropolitan area. Maine's high asthma rates and smoggy coastlines are directly related to the traffic on the turnpike.

To combat the widespread misunderstanding, the state has been working cooperatively with auto dealers and environmentalists to design a "green vehicle" label to designate vehicles that meet federal standards for "low-emission vehicles" -- cars with exhausts that don't exceed restrictions on the pollutants that contribute to ground-level ozone and acid rain. To qualify for a sticker, the vehicle must also reach or exceed highway gas mileage of 30 miles to the gallon.

Colorful half-circle labels depicting a car superimposed on a pine tree were printed in 2000 and distributed to auto dealerships as far north as Bangor. But with minimal funding and countless other state priorities, the voluntary program has lagged, said Melissa Morrill of the DEP's Bureau of Air Quality.

This spring, the coalition behind the study has used its data to launch an advertising campaign to convince consumers that their emissions matter.

In radio spots, the chickadee from Maine's license plate coughs and sputters, and draws connections between vehicle emissions and Maine's high asthma rates. Newspaper advertising will promote the sticker and an educational Web site with glib slogans including: "High emissions are sooo 20th century" or "Except for the toxic emissions, you have nothing to lose." For now, the campaign is directed primarily at the southern Maine counties where air pollution exceeds federal Clean Air Act standards.

But after studies of the ads' effectiveness are conducted, the effort may be expanded to include the entire state, Rubin said.

No one is calling for the sticker program to be made mandatory, so public education is key in making it work, he said.

"We're just trying to get people to buy cleaner cars," Morrill said.

For more information on the Maine effort, visit levforme.org. To learn more about the gas mileage and emissions of your car, visit the EPA's Green Vehicle Guide online at www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/.

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