'Trump’s latest attempt to stick his thumb in California’s eye — the revocation of the state’s treasured authority to set its own auto emissions rules — rests on very shaky legal ground,' writes columnist hiltzikm.
Few federal agencies would entirely escape the meat cleaver in President Trump’s proposed budget, but none is facing more devastating cuts than the Environmental Protection Agency.during a news conference Thursday announcing the waiver revocation. The less stringent standards would make new cars cheaper, encouraging Americans to replace their older, more dangerous vehicles, Wheeler claimed, without evidence.On the whole, Wheeler and Chao made a host of unintelligible arguments.
So too have Honda and three other carmakers , which have agreed with California on a plan to raise average fleet mileage to 50 mpg by model year 2026. Instead of hailing the initiative as a worthy advance on the environmental front, which would be a grown-up reaction, the Trump administration has opened an antitrust investigation of the four companies, which is the way a petulant infant would react.
Wheeler acknowledged that California “has uniquely bad problems with smog-forming pollutants” and that “there’s a direct and tight link between California cars and their emissions ... and the impacts they have on California.” Yet he also denied that California needs its standards to meet “compelling and extraordinary conditions.”
His point seemed to be that smog has nothing to do with greenhouse gases — “California cars have no closer link to California climate impacts than do cars on the road in Japan or anywhere else in the world” — so California should just concentrate on reducing smog and back off from any broader ambitions.
Indeed, it’s the quality of scientific thinking like this that could be the biggest roadblock to Trump’s getting his way. “The rulemaking record for the [2013] action was far more robust,” Stein told me, “and there’s plenty of evidence in this rulemaking record that contradicts the action the administration is taking now. So there are strong grounds for California and others to challenge the administration here.
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