Proposal hits at car-emission rules
Fight looms over U.S. bid to relax Obama fuel standards
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday unveiled its long-awaited proposal to dramatically weaken regulations designed to limit vehicle emissions, which contribute to climate change.
The publication of the proposal sets up a race among opponents of the change — an unusual mix of environmentalists, automakers, consumer groups and states — to temper the plan before it is finalized this year.
The proposal would freeze rules requiring automakers to build cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars, including hybrids and electric vehicles, and unravel one of President Barack Obama’s signature policies to combat global warming. It also would challenge the right of states to set their own, more stringent tailpipe pollution standards, setting the stage for a legal clash that could ultimately split the nation’s auto market in two.
The Trump administration’s proposal, jointly published by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, would roll back a 2012 rule that required automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles to an average of about 54 mpg by 2025. That rule, which would have significantly cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions while saving billions of barrels of oil, was opposed by automakers who said it was overly burdensome.
In a statement Thursday titled “Make Cars Great Again” and published on The Wall Street Journal’s website, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Andrew Wheeler, the acting administrator of the EPA, wrote that the Obama-era standards
would “impose significant costs on American consumers and eliminate jobs,” and that their new proposal would “give consumers greater access to safer, more affordable vehicles, while continuing to protect the environment.”
The new proposal would freeze the increase of average fuel-economy standards after 2021 at about 37 mpg. It would revoke a legal waiver, granted to California under the 1970 Clean Air Act and now followed by 13 other states, that allows those states to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards than the ones followed by the federal government.
The Trump administration contends that, by promoting the manufacture and sale of lighter cars, the Obama standards could lead to about 12,700 more auto fatalities.
William Wehrum, the EPA’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, added, “There is a tension between
calling for ever-increasing efficiency standards on one hand, and the obligation to have safe vehicles on the road.”
While that conclusion forms the basis of the Trump administration’s reasoning on rolling back the pollution rule, it is in direct opposition to the Obama administration’s analysis of the same rule, which found that improving fueleconomy standards would actually lead to about 100 fewer auto-related casualties. Experts have disputed the accuracy of the Trump administration’s new analysis.
“The administration’s effort to roll back these standards is a denial of basic science and a denial of American automakers’ engineering capabilities and ingenuity,” said John DeCicco, an expert on transportation technology at the University of Michigan.
Republican lawmakers cheered the proposal.
“I applaud the Trump administration for proposing new standards for cars and trucks,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman
of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “Unless the Obama administration’s punishing standards are changed, consumer choice will be limited and the cost of vehicles will skyrocket.”
The proposal quickly met with criticism, even from some of the automakers that Trump has said he wants the plan to help. Critics of the plan — including manufacturers of cars and car parts, environmentalists, auto dealerships, consumer groups and at least a dozen states — are expected to spend the coming months urging the Trump administration to significantly change the proposal before issuing a final version.
While the chief executives of auto companies last year asked Trump to loosen the Obama-era rules, they have since asked him not to pull them as far back as he has sought to do in Thursday’s proposal. Since the proposal seeks to revoke states’ rights to set their own pollution standards, the states that do so, led by California, are seen
as likely to sue the administration. If that were to happen, the plan could end up tangled in litigation for years, leaving automakers caught in regulatory uncertainty.
Furthermore, if the Trump administration ultimately lost that legal battle, it could split the nation’s auto market in two, with one set of emissions standards set forth by the federal government, while a group of major states including California enforced their separate, stricter rules. Automakers have called that a worst-case scenario.
The governor of California, Jerry Brown, said his state was prepared to fight.
“For Trump to now destroy a law first enacted at the request of Ronald Reagan five decades ago is a betrayal and an assault on the health of Americans everywhere,” he said.
The attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra, intends to work with at least 18 other states to file a suit against the plan, a representative from Becerra’s office said Thursday.