Yesterday, President Trump announced (via tweet, of course) that his administration will (attempt to) revoke California’s right to set emissions standards for automobiles that are stronger than federal standards.
Bizarrely, he claimed that not allowing California and the dozen-plus states that signed on to its standards to require cleaner cars will, in fact, lead to more people buying “new, extremely environmentally friendly cars.”
Trump is telling car manufacturers they don’t need to make to make cleaner cars, so that people can buy cleaner cars.
But of course this has nothing to do with Trump doing anything environmentally friendly, and has everything to do with making sure Americans are still buying plenty of gas. After all, auto makers themselves have opposed Trump’s rollback of Obama-era standards, supporting California’s right to protect its citizens more strongly than the federal government. And not surprisingly, the public strongly supports setting limits on pollution like this, which not only keep us safe and clean, but also creates hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The only group that benefits from this move is the oil industry, which has its operatives working on this, those both in and out of the Trump administration.
Though the administration is known for being corrupt, it’s also pretty inept. Odds are slim that this order will survive the inevitable lawsuits. California’s right to set stronger standards comes from the Clean Air Act, so it’s not even clear that Trump has the authority to revoke it. It’s only been tried once before, by George W. Bush, but the court case was tossed when Obama changed course. A replay of that dynamic is likely if Trump loses in 2020.
This will require years to work its way through the courts before it’s decided. Time that could be spent advancing climate action will instead by spent on this wild goose chase.
And that, really, is what the climate legacy of the Trump administration will be. Given its abysmal record in winning suits that challenge the administration's policies, once he’s out of office the next president should be able to undo most of the damage to the regulatory system.
But we won’t be able to get this time back. The four years spent going nowhere on climate, plus the years after that spent fighting either a second Trump term or the lingering lawsuits around his policies, is time that we needed to spend reducing emissions.
Instead of making our way to climate safety, the US federal government is spinning its wheels, all while greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise. And all those extra carbon dioxide and methane molecules in the air from Trump’s climate destroying time in office will warm the atmosphere for generations, meaning the impact of these four years will last for years.
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