EPA no longer supports ‘Obama’ emission standards
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced Monday that the agency would not endorse the ambitious emission target as proposed by the Obama administration a few years ago. It requires cars and light trucks sold in the United States to average more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025, a goal deemed unrealistic and very costly by car makers – not least the domestic ones.
According to the Washington Post, the decision reflects the power of the auto industry, which asked EPA's administrator to revisit the fuel-efficiency (miles-per-gallon) targets just days after he took office. Last year, president Trump told workers in Detroit that he was determined to roll back the emissions rules as part of a bigger effort to boost the nation’s car industry.
The EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would establish a standard that “allows auto manufacturers to make cars that people both want and can afford — while still expanding environmental and safety benefits of newer cars”, Pruitt said.
California puts up a fight
The decision is sure to spark legal and political battles, the Washington Post reports. The Clean Air Act allows the state of California to set its own emissions limits. Trump has threatened to revoke this waiver, which triggered California to respond with the promise of legal action. The dispute has broad implications, because 12 other states, representing more than a third of the country’s car market, follow California’s standards.
In response to Pruitt’s announcement, Mary Nichols, head of the California Air Resources Board, said: “This is a politically motivated effort to weaken clean vehicle standards with no documentation, evidence or law to back up that decision. EPA’s action, if implemented, will worsen people’s health with degraded air quality and undermine regulatory certainty for automakers.” According to Nichols, the decision takes the U.S. auto industry backward.
Decelerating evolution
In fact, efficiency gains that the U.S. car fleet has made in recent decades have slowed since 2013, as petrol prices fell and the sale of pick-up trucks and SUVs accelerated, the Washington Post reports. A document signed by Pruitt earlier this week states that the EPA had been “optimistic in its assumptions and projections” about the availability of technology to meet the standards.
The EPA also says to have received substantial input from automakers that the standards need to be scaled back. According to Pruitt, consumers will hold onto older cars if cleaner vehicles are too expensive, thereby lowering the overall efficiency of cars on the road.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers endorses EPA’s shift, estimating that it would be more realistic to impose an mpg target in the high 40s by 2025. Federal figures show that the American fleet averaged 31.8 mpg for model year 2017.
Pictured: the Ford F150, America's best-selling pick-up truck, is not exactly helping to reduce the country's average CO2 emissions (copyright: Ford, 2018)
