Yesterday, Donald Trump and his Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler leveled the single biggest assault against our climate and clean air in US history. The backlash and response has been swift. Here’s a bit of what people are saying:
It’ll worsen public health, national security.
E&E News notes that while the proposal may be based on improving highway safety “the Trump administration has undervalued another important factor that contributes to mortality — climate change.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the rollback “would undermine efforts by California and several other states to meet commitments the U.S. made in the Paris agreement on climate change. It would also worsen air quality problems in Southern California and other areas where officials are already struggling to clean smog and ease rates of asthma and other illnesses.”
The American Security project says the rollback “is detrimental to our energy security and national security,” and that the clean car standards “don’t just reduce oil consumption—they’re also the best policy the U.S. has on the books to combat climate change.”
Experts are immediately questioning the administration’s logic:
Numerous scientists and experts are finding holes in the central pillars of the administration’s logic for the rollback. Even more shocking, those who are cited in the proposal are saying that their work has been misconstrued and misrepresented.
President for the Center of Automotive Research Carla Bailo: "It's hard to say what the logic is or what the thought is from the EPA in the Trump administration."
Antonio M. Bento, Professor of public policy and economics at the University of Southern California: “I don’t know how they are going to defend this analysis, I just don’t think it’s correct.”
John M. DeCicco, research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute: the rollback amounts to a “denial of basic science and a denial of American automakers’ engineering capabilities and ingenuity.”
The rollback has been chaotic and full of infighting from the beginning.
Before the rollback was even announced, there were reports that EPA and DOT were fighting over jurisdiction, and that some inside the administration didn’t fully back the conclusions or findings.
Jeff Alson, former staffer in EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality: "They put the EPA logo on specifically to deceive the American public to make it look like the agency technical staff was involved in the analysis and supports the analysis, but nothing could be farther from the truth."
According to the Washington Post, officials at the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality warned that the proposal at that point contained “a wide range of errors, use of outdated data, and unsupported assumptions.”
And none of this is to say that even Trump’s own report says that the rollback will cost 60,000 auto jobs by 2030. The Trump administration's actions yesterday are a disaster for our climate, for our communities, and for workers. So much for making cars great again...
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