6/10/2020 U.S.

U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change - The New York Times

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U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key

Effort to Fight Climate Change
By Coral Davenport
Ms. Davenport has been covering federal climate change policy since the George W.
Bush administration.

Published March 30, 2020 Updated March 31, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to announce its final

rule to rollback Obama-era automobile fuel efficiency standards, relaxing efforts to limit
climate-warming tailpipe pollution and virtually undoing the government’s biggest effort to
combat climate change.

The new rule, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of
Transportation, would allow cars on American roads to emit nearly a billion tons more
carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the vehicles than they would have under the Obama
standards and hundreds of millions of tons more than will be emitted under standards being
implemented in Europe and Asia.

Trump administration officials raced to complete the auto rule by this spring, even as the
White House was consumed with responding to the coronavirus crisis. President Trump is
expected to extol the rule, which will stand as one of the most consequential regulatory
rollbacks of his administration, as a needed salve for an economy crippled by the pandemic.

The lower fuel-efficiency standard “is the single most important thing that the
administration can do to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise of reforming the
regulatory state, and to undo the impact that the previous administration has had on the
economy,” said Thomas J. Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, an
organization that supports the use of fossil fuels.

Mr. Trump’s critics said the rule showed the president’s disregard for science and could
actually harm the economy over time. The administration’s own draft economic analyses of
the rule showed that it could hurt consumers by forcing them to buy more gasoline. And a
February report by a panel of government-appointed scientists, many of them selected by
the Trump administration, concluded that “there are significant weaknesses in the scientific
analysis” of the rule.

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6/10/2020 U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change - The New York Times

“This is not just an inopportune moment to finalize a major rule-making,” said Senator
Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment
Committee. “In this case, it’s a completely irresponsible one.”

Even many large automakers, which had asked Mr. Trump to slightly loosen the Obama-era
rule, had urged him not to roll it back so aggressively, since the measure is certain to get
bogged down in court for years, leaving their industry in regulatory limbo.

“The auto industry has consistently called for year-over-year increases in fuel efficiency,”
said John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group
that represents the world’s largest auto companies. “We need a policy environment that
drives improvements in fuel economy, and the infrastructure that supports a transformation
to net-zero emissions.”

The new rule, which is expected to be implemented by late spring, will roll back a 2012 rule
that required automakers’ fleets to average about 54 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead, the
fleets would have to average about 40 miles per gallon.

To meet the new number, fuel economy standards would have to rise by about 1.5 percent a
year, compared to the 5 percent annual increase required by the Obama rule. The auto
industry, without any regulation, has recently achieved an average annual increase in fuel
economy of 2.4 percent.

The new standard would lead to nearly a billion more tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide
released and the consumption of about 80 billion more gallons of gasoline over the lifetime of
the vehicles built during the terms of the rule, according to a recent draft of the plan.

For Mr. Trump, completing the rollback of his predecessor’s climate change policy caps a
three-year effort to weaken or undo nearly 100 rules and regulations that had limited
industrial pollution of smog, toxic chemicals, greenhouse gases and water contaminants.

Businesses said those rules had cut their growth and left them less competitive in a global
economy. Environmentalists said they were vital to the health and future of the planet and
its inhabitants.

For environmentalists, the tailpipe-emissions rule culminates Mr. Trump’s quest to

dismantle the United States’ efforts to fight climate change, which has so far included
pulling out of the global Paris climate change accord, weakening rules to curb greenhouse
gas emissions from coal-fired electric plants, and undermining the basic science that
underpins environmental regulations.

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6/10/2020 U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change - The New York Times

The regulation on vehicle fuel economy, first issued in 2009 and updated in 2012, was the
first federal policy to lower emissions of greenhouse gases that causes climate change, and it
remains the policy that would have reduced emissions the most, chiefly by targeting the
nation’s largest source of climate-warming emissions: cars and trucks.

“In the march of rollbacks of climate rules, this is the biggest step,” said David Victor,
director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of
California, San Diego.

Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, and Elaine Chao, the transportation

secretary, in Washington last year.  Sarah Silbiger/Reuters

The new rule creates short-term regulatory relief for automakers, lifting requirements that
had forced them to invest heavily in developing and marketing hybrid, electric and low-
pollution vehicles.

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But in the long run, analysts say, the new standard could actually bring more uncertainty to
the auto industry. The legal status of the new Trump rule remains unclear; about 20 states
are expected to sue the administration to undo it in a case expected to be resolved by the

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6/10/2020 U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change - The New York Times

Supreme Court in the coming years.

Trump administration officials have been plagued with difficulties and delays as they have
tried to write a rule that would meet the president’s desire for a drastic regulatory rollback
that also would be scientifically sound and legally defensible.

The chief cause of the delay has been an internal economic analysis concluding that the rule
would harm consumers more than helping them. A draft of the rule sent to the White House
in January calculated that the new fuel economy target would lower the prices of new cars
and light trucks by about $1,000, but it would increase the amount consumers would pay for
gasoline by about $1,400.

The administration’s draft analysis concluded that the rule could actually cost the American
economy between $13 billion and $22 billion.

As administration officials sought to rework those numbers to show that the rule would help
consumers, automakers pushed the White House to complete the rule by March 30, the
deadline needed to begin manufacturing vehicles under the new standard for the 2022 model
year.

Over the weekend, White House officials looked at a new option for their cost-benefit
analysis, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked to speak anonymously
because the rule was not yet final. Their solution was an approach that factors in the
estimated costs of building fuel-efficient vehicles that are, so far, less popular with
consumers. By eliminating the Obama-era mandate to build and sell such vehicles, the
thinking goes, automakers would see an economic benefit in the range of $38 billion to $58
billion.

Some analysts scoffed at that assertion.

“It’s not going to be supported by the science,” said Chet France, a former senior E.P.A.
vehicle emissions specialist who is now a consultant who works with the Environmental
Defense Fund, an advocacy group. “This will be the icing on cake of the legal flaws.”

If the rule does survive legal challenges, it would put the United States out of step with the
rest of the global auto market, moving it from one of the strongest fuel economy standards in
the world to one of the weakest. The American standard would be lower than those of the
European Union, China, India, Japan and South Korea. That could present long-term
challenges to the American auto industry, as other automakers develop more sophisticated,
high-efficiency, low-pollution vehicles while American ones focus on gas guzzlers.

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6/10/2020 U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change - The New York Times

The new measure will combine with a related rule, issued last year, that revoked the right of
California and other states to set their own tougher vehicle emissions standards. California
has spearheaded a pair of multistate lawsuits to block both rules, escalating a political war
between Mr. Trump and the nation’s most populous state.

Morning traffic in Solana Beach, Calif., in December. The state has tussled with the
administration over auto emissions since last summer. Mike Blake/Reuters

Ultimately, the limits on atmospheric emissions will most likely be decided by the Supreme
Court. Automakers most fear verdicts that uphold the legal authority of California and other
states to enact their own standards, and allow the Trump standards to move forward
elsewhere. That would split the nation’s auto market in two.

“One thing we’ve learned from the Trump administration is be careful what you ask for,” said
Dr. Victor of the University of California, San Diego.

“The auto industry wanted a smoother glide path to a more efficient future,” he added.
“Instead what they got was the populist politics of the far right, which is blowing up in their
faces.”

Mr. Trump’s defenders say his moves are not aimed at automakers but at consumers who
generally prefer larger vehicles, such as pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.

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6/10/2020 U.S. to Announce Rollback of Auto Pollution Rules, a Key Effort to Fight Climate Change - The New York Times

“He’s not doing it to be conciliatory to industry, he’s doing it for consumers, and for his own
personal and political reason,” Mr. Pyle said.

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