Experts question administration’s ‘low gas mileage saves lives’ claim

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration claimed Thursday that in addition to lowering the price of vehicles, it can save 12,700 lives by weakening Obamaera emissions standards for cars and trucks. But that estimate relies on assumptions that have been questioned by experts in and out of the federal government.

The proposal would freeze tailpipe pollution standards at an average of 37 miles per gallon in 2020, instead of raising them to more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025 as set under PresidentBarack Obama.

Half of the deaths the Trump plan says it would prevent are based on the idea that making new cars more efficient would make them cheaper to drive, because people wouldn’t have to spend as much on gas. That would lead people to spend more time on the road and increase the potentialfor fatalities.

Accordingto the Trump administration’s logic, cars that burn more gas and are more expensiveto drive will be used significanty less, and so will leadto 6,340 fewer deaths.

The other half of deaths that would come from sticking with Obama-era standards, according to the Trump fuel efficiency proposal released Thursday, would fall into two other basic categories.

The first are linked to the argument that technologies to make vehicles more efficient are expensive, which will drive up new car prices, reduce sales, and keep some motoristsbehind the wheel of older cars that are less safe.

The second chunk is more mysterious, and has become a particularsource of wonky debate and speculation among the small group of experts trying to digest the dense tables and thousands of pages of analysis that underpin the new fuel standards proposal, which is one of the Trump administration’s most aggressiveregulatory rollbacks.

Jeff Alson, a senior engineer who spent a decade working on the emissions standards at the Environmental Protection Agency, says this second category in particular, even with numerous unknowns, points to major shortcomings in the administration’s proposal.

That category is based on a “wacky”-seeming set of numbersthat suggest an argument he had never encountered in four decades of environmental work with the agency, Mr. Alson said. The Trump administration seems to be saying that jettisoning the Obama-era standards will not only get some more people to buynew cars — which may or may not be true, Mr. Alson said — but they are also saying it will get other people to drivetheir old cars even less.

“It’smaking up the fact that people will drive less in their used old cars, and that’s a major blunder,” said Mr. Alson, who retired from the agency in April. He added that he doesn’t “know whether it was consciousor not.”

But the reduced driving is a major factor in the administration’s argument that it can save lives, he said.

Backup tables released this week show the administration assumes, depending on how it’s counted, that in the coming decades Americans will drive between about 1.5 trillion and more than 3 trillion fewer miles than they otherwise would under the Obama standards, he said. That’s a difference of a few percentage points a year, Mr. Alson said.

“You shouldn’t blame the standards for whether people are driving more or driving less. Those are choices people make,” Mr. Alson said. “They’re not saving lives because the vehicles are safer. They’re saving lives in the model because people are driving less, which accounts for the bulk of the fatalities.”

The EPA directed inquiries to the Department of Transportation, which did not immediately answer questions about whether its model appears to have a majorflaw, as Mr. Alson asserts.

The proposal, released jointly by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and EPA, does acknowledge that some of the decrease in driving under its plan — and thus lives saved — would be based on “consumer choice.”

Because of that, the administration said the dollar figures in its cost-benefit calculations do not include monetary values for the lives that it claims will be saved through the so-called “rebound effect.” That is the technical term for theconcept that more efficient carswill be driven more.

Analysts say the rebound effect is a real phenomenon. It is also true that more driving is associated with more deaths, which transportation researchers have tracked at times when the economy is picking up, for example. But critics said the Trump administration has far overstated the rebound effect, saying it willbe twice a big as what analysts working in the Obama administrationassumed.

That bigger estimated effect of better mileage on driving behavior helped boost the death totals the new proposal said would occur under Obama-era standards.

In the proposal released Thursday, those lives were tallied up and used to make the administration’s public case for its new plan.

“The fatalities are included because they are in fact physical impacts of the proposed standards, and it is important to present that transparently,” the department said in a statement.

Backers of the administration’s emissions plan say it is intended to reduce the burden regulations place on industry and to find the right balance between the environment, economyand public safety.

“We are delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American public that his administration would address and fix the current fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards,” said EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler in a statement. “More realistic standards can save lives while continuingto improve the environment.”

Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao said the proposal “will promote a healthy economy by bringing newer, safer, cleaner and more fuelefficient vehicles to U.S. roads and we look forward to receivinginput from the public.”

Several Republican lawmakers, free-market advocates and oil and gas interests praised the move.

Others have been highly critical, including health and environmental groups but also experts whose own research is cited in the administration’s proposal.

Antonio Bento, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Southern California, said Trump administration officials seemed to have “cherry picked” the effects that would lead to the conclusion they wanted: That more efficient cars would be more expensive and lead to more traffic fatalities. But Mr. Bento, whose work was referenced throughout the analysis, said the real-world evidence doesn’t support such an assumption.