California Urges Trump Administration to Abandon Fuel Rule Plan

by David Shepardson (Reuters) California’s top air regulator urged the Trump administration on Sunday to abandon a plan to freeze fuel efficiency standards through 2026, as automakers urged state and federal regulators to reach agreement to extend nationwide rules.

Mary Nichols, who chairs the state’s Air Resources Board, asked the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency to reverse course, saying the plan to freeze requirements at 2020 levels “turns its back on decades of progress in cleaning up cars and trucks.”

The Trump administration also wants to revoke California’s authority to set its own strict tailpipe emissions rules and mandate the sale of electric vehicles. California is moving ahead with setting its own rules, and 19 states said in August they would challenge the rollback in court.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group representing General Motors Co, Volkswagen AG , Toyota Motor Corp, Ford Motor Co and others, again urged California and the Trump administration to reach agreement to retain nationwide emissions rules and avoid a prolonged legal battle.

The Trump plan would hike U.S. oil consumption by about 500,000 barrels per day by the 2030s but reduce automakers regulatory costs by more than $300 billion.

Nichols’ testimony dismissed central Trump administration arguments: that the rules will save up to 12,700 motorists lives over the coming decades because they lower the price of new vehicles, prod people into buying safer newer vehicles faster and result in motorists driving less because gas-guzzling vehicles will cost more to operate.

An EPA memo released in August said some officials believed the plan would actually increase traffic deaths from 2036 through 2045 because of increasing vehicle travel. READ MORE

Excerpt from Washington Post: Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.

But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.

The document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a roughly four degree Celsius or seven degree Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial levels.

The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.” READ MORE