Automakers out of reverse
The Trump administration’s move to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling Monday signaled a bitterend commitment to climate change denial the day after Death Valley apparently hit 130 degrees, possibly the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. But the day also brought a hopeful sign that President Trump represents a last gasp of abject resistance to this reality.
Five automakers accounting for about a third of the U.S. market reached a legal agreement with California regulators to boost average fuel efficiency even though the Trump administration would give them license to pollute more. The California Air Resources Board’s enforceable pact with Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW and Volvo stands as a rejection of one of the president’s most significant environmental retreats by its supposed corporate beneficiaries.
Trump apparently recognized it as such, hence the Justice Department’s laughable antitrust investigation of the four automakers that announced the agreement in principle last year. After the probe ended uneventfully, a federal prosecutor testified that it was launched in response to a presidential Twitter tirade and “did not appear to be in good faith.”
The deal requires the manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency from about 38 to 51 miles per gallon by 2026, or about 4% per model year, close to the 54 mpg target set by the Obama administration and California in 2012. The Trump administration rule rolling back the Obama standard, finalized in March, sets the standard at 40 mpg, less than automakers expected to achieve without regulation, permitting nearly a billion more tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Both the federal rule and the California deal modify the governments’ earlier positions, suggesting a missed opportunity for a responsible compromise. As it stands, the Supreme Court is expected to settle the administration’s challenge to California’s longstanding right to set its own pollution standards, which are followed by 13 other states.
In the meantime, manufacturers face deep uncertainty about which regulations they should follow and whether the court or the election will upend them. What’s not in doubt is the need to grapple with climate change and the increasing isolation of the president and others who refuse to do so.