Back on Valentine’s day, we pointed you to stories from The Atlantic and the New York Times detailing the “turducken of falsehoods” required to justify the Trump administration’s proposal to roll back Obama-era standards for automotive fuel efficiency.
All those errors, like reversing how supply and demand work, came after plenty of reporting showed that even with the faulty math, the rule would cost American lives, jobs, and money, which is why only the oil industry pushed for it and was grateful to get it.
The final rule materials say the change will result in Americans buying an additional 2 billion barrels of oil through 2029, adding around 900 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
And that’s just the start. InsideEPA dove into the finalized environmental impact statement for the “Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE)” rule, and found that it is neither safer, nor more affordable, and obviously, much less fuel-efficient than what it’s overturning.
According to the Trump administration’s own analysis, the move could cost society some $22 billion, and cause as many as an additional 1,000 deaths from the increased air pollution alone. On top of that, the fuel economy rollback will bring an additional $13.1 billion in net costs to the public.
InsideEPA reports that the preamble to the rule says that “the net benefits straddle zero,” because depending on the choice of discount rate (a concept best explained with otters) the rule either costs $35 billion (at a 3% discount rate) or will provide $22.5 billion in benefits (under a 7% discount rate.)
Another way the administration has tweaked the numbers is to only count American costs, and ignore how greenhouse gas pollution would be bad for people around the world, because that would add another $35 billion in costs.
But hey, it’s worth it for the jobs, right? Well, not so much. As InsideClimateNews points out, in the rule, “the Trump administration makes a striking admission: Less efficient cars will mean a future of about 10,000 fewer auto industry jobs per year.”
After decades of Republican insistence that any regulatory policy be carefully balanced by economic concerns so that keeping our environment clean and the public healthy doesn’t come at too great a burden to polluter profits or jobs and the economy, Trump has rolled out a policy that will reduce job growth, cost us billions at the pump, and literally kill people.
And that’s according to its own analysis!
The good news is the legal efforts to thwart this move should be straightforward and successful, and there are already good signs of that.
Yesterday, a court ordered the EPA to release its core modeling, which will help those suing to stop the policy suss out just how much they had to cook the books. Given that even after being cooked the numbers don’t add up for Trump, revealing what went into the secret sauce should be quite interesting!
But that means the oil industry can’t exactly count on this change surviving the courts. That will probably be on the minds of the 7 oil industry CEOs who are scheduled to meet with Trump on Friday, no doubt cooking up the next turducken of falsehoods.
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