As part of their plan to wreck planet Earth simply because they heard that’s where Barack Obama keeps his stuff, Donald Trump’s anti-EPA is preparing to weaken both emissions standards and fuel efficiency requirements for vehicles. Because there’s nothing like kneecapping the future.
The rules also would have put the United States, historically a laggard in fuel economy regulations, at the forefront worldwide in the manufacture of electric and highly fuel efficient vehicles. …
American automakers initially accepted the plan by Mr. Obama in 2009 to harmonize what was then a hodgepodge of pollution and efficiency standards set by the E.P.A., the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and California. And the automakers weren’t in much of a position to resist; they had just taken an $80 billion bailout to survive a global economic crisis.
But any gratitude manufacturers felt is many financial quarters in the past.
It’s not difficult to guess the results of creating “relaxed” standards for emissions and fuel economy in the United States while the rest of the world, plus California, keeps moving ahead. We don’t really have to guess, because we’ve been there before. For decades, Republican lawmakers like Missouri’s Roy Blunt fought to keep fuel economy standards low and emission standards lax. That allowed US automakers to build vehicles more cheaply, without investing in either the research or retooling needed to generate more and cleaner miles. It also had a immediate result on vehicles in the US market—the US became a dumping ground for older engines. Even if consumers wanted something better, they found that European and Asian manufacturers often sold more efficient cars in other markets, and vehicles a generation or more behind in the US.
In the short term, reducing standards might allow US makers to generate more dollars per vehicle sold, reduce development costs, and provide extra margins that would give them more potential pricing flexibility. And US developers could still create cars suitable for world markets—they just would not make them here. In other words, manufacturers would win by making their “world market” cars outside the US, saddling US consumers with inferior products, and pocketing the change.
And that’s before calculating the environmental cost.
Rolling these standards back “substantially” would be a big, big deal. It would mean that Trump is undoing a big chunk of progress, by gutting an enormously important initiative at the heart of the U.S. effort to combat carbon dioxide emissions — and global warming.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, US consumers were able to see new models being introduced by even US manufacturers for the world market, while consumers in the US were left to deal with aging, inefficient designs year after year. Legislators like Blunt snickered that trying to improve fuel efficiency would leave Americans driving around in “clown cars,” even as the rest of the world met and exceeded proposed standards in the US.
The long-term result was a steep erosion of market share for US makers both inside and outside that United States. But that was … the long term effect. For manufacturers who rarely look past the next quarter, it was hard to see beyond the promise of being able to create an almost immediate improvement in vehicle margins. It still is.
Major automakers would welcome the change. …
President Trump has also spoken about rolling back the efficiency rules, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or Cafe. “I’m sure you've all heard the big news that we’re going to work on the Cafe standards so you can make cars in America again,” Mr. Trump said at a Detroit auto research facility in March last year. “We want to be the car capital of the world again. We will be, and it won’t be long.”
Except that as America’s standards go down, and EPA Director Scott Pruitt gives his staff false statements to make about climate change, the rest of the world is increasingly moving toward cleaner, more efficient vehicles, with several manufacturers making plans to electrify their entire fleet over the next decade. It wasn’t until President Obama set a clear US standard in 2009 that US policy became the de facto world standard. If the US backs off its numbers, the rest of the world may go back with it … but will more likely continue on a standard of their own, leaving the US behind.
All that Trump and Pruitt can achieve by this action is to cement American cars and America itself as a global pariah.
“Right now, cleaning up cars is the biggest step that the United States is taking to curb its carbon pollution,” David Doniger, a senior analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me this morning. “Now they’re taking a whack at that. This would cripple the biggest step we’re taking to do our part in fighting climate change.”