The Energy 202: Ex-EPA Engineer Says Wheeler Is Misleading Congress about Car Rule
by Dino Grandoni (Washington Post) Jeff Alson was sitting in his apartment in Ann Arbor, Mich., when he felt like he was going to explode. … (Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew) Wheeler said Nichols never offered a counterproposal and accused Nichols of not being “a good faith actor in this rulemaking.” He added that “[h]er testimony that EPA professional staff were cut out of this proposal’s development is false.”
It was that last statement that got Alson’s blood boiling.
“I can speak from direct experience that Mary Nichols is telling the truth and Administrator Wheeler is lying,” he said.
According to Alson, under previous administrations technical staff at the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department, would spend hours ironing out details of how fuel-efficiency standards should work before the agencies jointly rolled out the tailpipe rules for new cars.
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But Alson said before the Trump administration’s proposal was rolled out, there were no such technical meetings between the technical staffs of NHTSA and the National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory, the EPA’s state-of-the-art facility in Michigan where investigators helped uncover the Volkswagen emissions scandal and where Alson worked for decades.
Instead, he said, there were only a few what he calls “check-the-box” meetings between the agencies in early 2018.
“NHTSA was unwilling to tell EPA what they were doing,” Alson said. “At the end of the day, they completely controlled every piece of analysis.”
During a joint hearing of two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees Thursday, Democrats grilled the EPA’s air policy chief, Bill Wehrum, about his office’s involvement in the proposal.
“Was it accurate that they had little involvement in the process?” said Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), referring to the Office of Air and Radiation.
“Through the course of this rulemaking, EPA has had a substantial amount of involvement,” Wehrum responded.
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An internal EPA analysis at the time, however, found that not going through with the Obama-era rules would lead to slightly more fatalities. At one point, the disagreement became so pronounced that an EPA staffer asked for the agency’s name and logo to be removed from a key regulatory report.
California and other states have vowed to challenge the freezing of the fuel-efficiency standards in court once they are finalized. If the EPA’s technical staff were cut out of the process, as Alson contends, that may provide fodder for a lawsuit.
“The Clean Air Act requires EPA to be ‘the decider’ for its own rules, so IF it could be clearly shown in the record that EPA relinquished decision-making authority to NHTSA, that could be a problem for EPA in the courts,” Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, wrote by email. READ MORE
Climate change denialists dubbed auto makers the ‘opposition’ in fight over Trump’s emissions rollback (New York Times)
