Transportation

Environmental Groups Join Forces Against Trump’s MPG Rollbacks


Amid a worldwide pandemic, legal life continues. One notable example is what’s happening with 12 groups that sued the Trump Administration yesterday over its efforts to weaken the clean car standards put into place under President Obama.

At issue are the updated fuel economy standards that were announced in 2010 and originally called for a dramatic increase in the corporate average fuel economy, five percent a year, of vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2026. The Trump Administration announced earlier this year that it would instead downplay that to just 1.5 percent a year, after originally saying (in 2018) that it wanted to end the annual fuel economy improvements in 2020. At the time, The Guardian said Trump’s rules would allow vehicles in the U.S. to emit around a billion more tons of carbon dioxide than the Obama rules, and this despite the fact (as the 12 groups involved in the lawsuit noted this week) that since the rules were issued in 2010, “the auto industry has thrived, achieving record sales, while drivers saved $90 billion in fuel costs.”

As part of the new pair of lawsuits, one filed against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Department of Transportation, the other against the Environmental Protection Agency, the dozen environmental groups involved say that the Trump administration’s rollback of the clean car and fuel economy standards is illegal and “based on massive technical and economic errors – and fails to meet core legal requirements.” One of the non-health drawbacks to the rules change would be that it will end up costing consumers “at least $175 billion in additional fuel costs, according to the EPA’s own calculations,” the groups say.

Public Citizen, one of the dozen, issued a statement the said the Trump administration’s “disgraceful efforts to gut the nation’s clean cars standards will cost consumers billions at the gas pump and set back the all-important effort to stem a global climate catastrophe.”

The Trump Administration, unsurprisingly, says that all of this worry is overblown and doesn’t even think of its reduction of the fuel economy standards are a “rollback” and claims auto industry engineers are not capable of hitting the five-percent-per-year average improvements that the Obama standards required.

For the record, the 12 groups that joined together to file the lawsuits are: Center for Biological Diversity, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Communities for a Better Environment, Conservation Law Foundation, Consumer Federation of America, Environment America, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Law and Policy Center, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), Public Citizen, Inc., Sierra Club and Union of Concerned Scientists. You can read the petitions for review yourself here and here. Both were filed in the DC court of appeals.

These lawsuits are separate from the other big fuel economy legal fight in the news this week, in which California and other states and cities are suing the Trump Administration over its fuel economy rollbacks. Life does go on.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.