Over the past couple of years, we’ve covered how Koch-funded groups have championed President Trump’s plan to make Americans buy more gas by rolling back fuel efficiency standards, how independent analysis showed the oil-industry-endorsed policy ignores basic economics, and the bizarre claim that not requiring more clean cars would lead to more clean cars.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the rollback is again delayed, in part because of the fact that it is so full of errors, with people familiar with the documents justifying the rule changes as being “‘swiss cheese,’ sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked ‘text forthcoming’.”
For even more, the Atlantic’s Rob Meyer published an incredible story detailing not only that the factual basis for the rollback is embarrassingly wrong in a number of ways, but also that the administration was made aware of these errors and proceeded anyway.
One of the most galling errors, Meyer reports, is that the rule got the law of supply and demand exactly backwards, claiming that without the SAFE rule, “as cars got more expensive, millions more people would drive them, and the number of traffic accidents would increase.” The inclusion of these “phantom vehicles,” the absolutely unjustified inflation of new purchases, “accounted for the majority of incorrect costs in the SAFE study that the Trump administration released in 2018,” Meyer writes. “It is what made SAFE look safe.”
And once you stop pretending millions of people will buy new cars because they’re more expensive, the independent analysis in Science found that, per Meyer, “traffic deaths could actually increase, carbon pollution would soar, and global warming would speed up.”
Between the Econ 101 failure of inverting supply and demand and that it “cited incorrect data and made calculation errors” like forgetting to divide by four, Meyer describes the rule’s justification as “a turducken of falsehoods.” One expert noted that they “couldn’t even bring ourselves to try to engage” at one point, because “we knew they had cooked the books so bad that there wasn’t any reason to talk about it.”
Because once those errors were corrected, it turns out that the rule’s costs do not exceed its benefits, failing one of the most basic and bipartisan policy tests.
Meyer gets deep into the long and fraught relationship between the EPA and National Highway and Transportation Safety Association, but the short version is that EPA experts were kept out of the reporting process by NHTSA. And when they finally saw NHTSA’s work on what the initial rule would’ve meant and what the rollback would mean, they were astonished at how rife it was with the errors and indefensible assumptions needed to make a regulation it said in 2016 would bring $88 billion in benefits instead impose $230 billion in costs.
And importantly, they made NHTSA, and the political leadership of the Trump administration, aware of the errors that, once fixed, showed that Trump’s “rollback would actually increase fatalities, killing 17 Americans a year.” But instead of actually doing anything with that information, the administration plowed ahead anyway, which is likely to be its undoing. As Meyer explains, to change rules, federal agencies “must publish a detailed and genuine explanation,” and if not, “a court can toss out the new rule, pronouncing it ‘arbitrary and capricious.’”
Given that the administration is well aware of the many basic factual failures of the SAFE rule, and that the corrected version of the NHTSA study will show a $34 billion cost to the US economy, an extra $1,400 in gas prices paid on average by consumers, and won’t actually save any lives, it seems all but assured that, like in over 90% of their cases so far, the Trump administration will lose this one, too. (For reference, the government historically has a win rate of 70 percent of challenges.)
One expert told Meyer that the mistakes the administration has made show “that they don’t know [anything] about how cars work.”
But that might be selling the administration short. After all, basic cooking is hard enough, be it numbers or meals, and a blundering, amateur chef surely wouldn’t be able to prepare a swiss cheese turducken of falsehoods quite as exquisite as this.
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