Trump raises mileage proposal

WASHINGTON >> The Trump administration is making a concession on its proposed minimum fuel economy requirement for new vehicles.

Fuel economy standards would increase 1.5% per year from 2021 through 2026 under the new proposal. That’s a reversal from the Trump administration’s proposal in 2018, which sought to freeze the standards at 2020 levels.

Environmentalists and Delaware Sen. Tom Carper hardly cheered the move, which doesn’t come close to the 5% annual increase that the Obama administration had mandated.

Carper, senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, released some details of the latest fuel-standards proposal in a letter Wednesday urging the administration to scrap its new mileage proposal as ineffective and costly.

“My office’s review of the draft final rule indicates that it utterly fails to provide any demonstrable safety, environmental or economic benefit to consumers or the country,” Carper wrote in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget.

The office reviews proposed regulations before they are finalized and printed in the Federal Register. The administration hasn’t released the numbers, but they are detailed in Carper’s letter to Paul Ray, a management and budget administrator.

The Trump administration has billed its mileage standards as safer and less costly to motorists, but there’s a growing chorus of critics disputing that, including the Trump EPA’s own scientific advisory board. The mileage rollback has become one of the most fiercely contested rollback efforts by the administration, prompting

legal battles with California and other states and splitting loyalties of top automakers.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which develops fuel economy rules, wouldn’t comment Thursday. It reissued a statement saying the rule will improve fuel economy, cut pollution and make vehicles more affordable.

When the Trump administration released its proposed “Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule” in 2018, it calculated that the rule would save 12,700 lives in car crashes through model year 2029. The logic was that relaxed fuel mileage standards would cut the cost of vehicles, making them more affordable and increasing sales. Since new vehicles are safer, lives would be saved.

The proposal pegged the cost of meeting Obamaera requirements at $2,700 per vehicle and said buyers would save that much per car by 2025.

But Carper wrote that the administration’s final proposal claims total savings of 474 lives through 2029. That number doesn’t include deaths associated with increased air pollution from less-efficient vehicles, Carper wrote.

Under calculations in the proposal, the purchase price would drop by $1,083 per vehicle under the revised standards, Carper wrote.