Trump plan puts brakes on fuel-economy regulations
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced plans Thursday to freeze fuel-efficiency requirements for the nation’s cars and trucks through 2026 — a massive regulatory rollback likely to spur a legal battle with California and other states as well as create potential upheaval in the nation’s automotive market.
The proposal represents a reversal of the findings that the government reached under President Barack Obama, when regulators argued that requiring more fuel-efficient vehicles would improve public health, combat climate change and save consumers money without compromising safety.
Trump’s plan also would revoke California’s long-standing legal waiver to set its own tailpipe restrictions, granted under the 1970 Clean Air Act, which the state has used most recently to try to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. It also would restrict the ability of states to follow California’s lead — something a dozen states and the District of Columbia already have done.
The likely legal clash over the policy threatens to rupture the nation’s auto market, doing away with uniform national standards negotiated by the Obama administration
ated by the Obama administration and potentially forcing automakers to produce different vehicles to meet standards in different states — something the industry has said it does not want.
On Thursday, a group of 19 attorneys general joined California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who vowed that the state would “use every legal tool at its disposal to defend today’s national standards and reaffirm the facts and science behind them.”
California Gov. Jerry Brown was more emphatic, saying his state “will fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.”
The Trump administration’s proposal argues that forcing automakers to essentially double the fuel economy of their fleets to reach an average of roughly 54 miles per gallon by 2025, as the Obama administration proposed in 2012, would make vehicles more expensive and encourage people to stick to driving older, less-safe cars and trucks.
The administration’s analysis, published jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, estimates that halting fuel-efficiency targets at 2020 levels could save $500 billion in “societal costs,” avoid thousands of highway fatalities and save Americans an estimated $2,340 on the cost of each new car.
The same analysis acknowledges that easing the Obama-era standards would increase U.S. fuel consumption by roughly a half-million barrels of oil per day and contribute to global warming from increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Public health experts and environmental groups condemned the White House proposal, arguing that it ignores the health benefits from less-polluting cars and would lead to Americans spending more money at the gas pump. They said the rollback would allow more carbon dioxide to spew from the nation’s vehicles, squandering a chance to combat climate change in the transportation sector, which has emerged as the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.
Some automakers privately have expressed unease at the abrupt freezing of fuel-economy standards and the prospect of having to meet different requirements in different states.
Ross Eisenberg, vice president for energy and resources policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, added that while the industry had pushed to revisit the Obama-era standards, “ultimately, manufacturers need a single national program that provides regulatory certainty and maintains vehicle affordability.”
Administration officials fought for weeks behind the scenes over the details of how to relax Obamaera standards. Top officials at the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency clashed over whether the White House’s justifications for the new policy can stand up to legal scrutiny.
In one recent internal presentation, part of which was obtained by The Washington Post, officials at the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality warned that the proposal at that point contained “a wide range of errors, use of outdated data, and unsupported assumptions.”
Ultimately, the two agencies published Thursday’s proposal jointly.
In hundreds of pages of analysis, NHTSA argues that the costs of meeting federal mileage requirements over the next few years would boost the sticker price of vehicles, prompting people to continue driving older cars and trucks rather than buying newer, more efficient ones. That would in turn increase the risks of accidents, they said.
EPA officials questioned some of those estimates, as well as the Department of Transportation’s idea that federal officials could block California and other states from imposing their own vehicle tailpipe standards on the grounds that a 1975 energy law reserved that right for the DOT.
The administration’s proposal argues that freezing the fleetwide average of 37 mpg in 2020 would prevent 12,700 traffic fatalities in vehicles built through model year 2029. But it discounts figures showing that more stringent fuel standards would save consumers thousands of dollars in gas costs and prevent the release of billions of tons of greenhouse gases in coming years.