A version of this column appears in today’s Washington Examiner (Web | PDF).
Fuel Standard Foolishness
By Steve Milloy
A host of blue states and several “environmental” groups have sued the Trump administration over its rollback of the Obama fuel economy standards. Is a 1.2% difference between the sides worth the hassle?
Any actual need for the standards, originally triggered by the 1970s energy crisis and fears of so-called “Peak Oil,” were put to rest about 10 years ago by the advent of fracking, which has produced an oil and gas glut that won’t end anytime soon.
But before the reality of fracking could catch up with the standards and their supporting bureaucracy, the Supreme Court intervened. Its decision in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA paved the way for blue states and their environmental activist allies to hijack the fuel economy standard setting process so that global warming became the driving rationalization.
Exploiting the SCOTUS ruling and the 2009 government bailout of the car industry, the Obama administration cowed the industry in 2012 into swallowing a fantastic schedule for essentially doubling fuel economy by 2025.
But technology is not dinner and can’t just be ordered. While fuel economy has increased by almost one-third since 2012, it is nowhere near where the Obama administration edict and has no chance of getting there via technology.
In 2018, the Trump administration proposed to freeze the standards essentially where they are now, justifying the freeze with improvements in car safety, reductions in traffic fatalities, reduction in vehicle costs and without discernible impacts on the environment and climate.
But as with all things Trump, blue states and their green allies are having none of it no matter how much sense it makes. So now the new standards will now begin a tortuous and likely multi-year journey through federal court system.
The rulemaking documents, related analyses and comments are thousands and thousands of pages long, practically beyond the comprehension and patience of anyone but regulatory mandarins who have spent their careers working on the standards.
All the mind-numbing documentation aside, what the dispute comes down to is this: plaintiff states want an average annual increase in fuel economy to be on the order of 2.7%, whereas the Trump administration has determined that a 1.5% annual increase is more than enough.
In 2012, the Obama administration had set the fuel economy standards to increase by 5% per year. But since carmakers can’t make this standard work via technology alone, there were only two options for meeting the Obama standard, light-weighting cars and selling more electric vehicles (EVs).
Lighter cars are more dangerous and increase the risk of car accident fatalities. No one disputes this. It’s just the physics of heavy and light objects crashing into each other.
While advocates can debate what is the precise death toll from light-weighting cars, its importance for meeting fuel economy standards cannot be understated. In its 2012 rulemaking, for example, the Obama administration was forced by its own political goals to pretend that making small cars lighter would have no impact on safety.
Selling EVs is so far not a promising option for carmakers. They struggle to sell the smaller, less convenient, more expensive cars. Only about half of current EV owners say they would consider another one, according to a survey commissioned by the Department of Transportation.
These realities are being ignored by the media in favor of hyperventilation from ex-Obama officials saying desperate things to influence the ongoing litigation.
Gina McCarthy, the Obama EPA official who oversaw development of the 2012 fuel economy standards, now heads the activist Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the two green groups suing over the new rule. McCarthy claims the rollback will result in 1,000 premature deaths from emissions. But as an EPA official, McCarthy oversaw multiple EPA clinical research studies showing automobile emissions harmed no one.
Another Obama EPA official is threatening the carmakers who support the rollback. “When the Democrats come into the White House, they aren’t going to forget what these companies have done,” Margo Oge told the Washington Post.
The rollback is also being sniped at by David Friedman, a lobbyist for Consumers Union, the left-wing publisher of Consumer Reports. Friedman claimed that the rollback would push gas prices higher, despite the ongoing global oil glut and oil prices briefly going negative in April. Media quoting Friedman omit mentioning he is another ex-Obama official intimately involved with the 2012 standards who spent 12 years with environmental activist group Union of Concerned Scientists before that.
There are also current career EPA officials, many of who worked on the Obama standards, who have literally been trying to sabotage the Trump redo of the standards from within the agency. Beyond just fabricating and leaking information to allies on Capitol Hill, EPA career staff has also inserted litigation booby-traps in rulemaking documents (like McCarthy’s claim about emissions killing people) to be exploited by blue state and green lawyers.
No one knows how any of this drama will play out, especially given the partisan nature of our judicial system and the ongoing election year.
Is any of this rigamarole worth the difference between the two sides – a 2.7% vs. 1.5% annual increase in fuel economy? Carmakers are free to improve fuel economy if they can and want. So why compel carmakers to do something that’s impossible and wouldn’t matter as far as the original or more recent purposes of the standards are concerned even if they could?
A 1970s government slogan for fuel economy was “Don’t be fuelish.” The lawsuit should now be dismissed with the admonition, “Don’t be foolish.”
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fox the EPA.”