After Years Of Whining, Lying, Lobbying, Automakers Get What They Want On MPG, Now Don't Want It
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As 2018 arrived, the Auto Alliance even pushed junk science, questioning in a legal document whether tailpipe pollution causes early deaths. (Decades of research has found that it does.) The Alliance also quoted legitimate studies out of context, implying that climate scientists “tune” their models to arrive at certain outcomes and that global warming does not exacerbate drought or hurricanes. Then, right around March of this year, automakers tapped the brakes. Perhaps officials in the Department of Transportation—which writes the fuel-economy rules with the EPA—signaled by that point that they wanted not just to loosen the rules, but to freeze them altogether. In any case, individual automakers began to dissent. Ford, whose executives have made climate change central to the company’s public image, suddenly took the time to speak up.
“The cost of believing [climate change] is not real is just too high,” wrote Bill Ford, the company’s chairman, in a Medium post at the end of that month. “We support increasing clean-car standards through 2025 and are not asking for a rollback.” (Ford’s nuts-and-bolts record on climate change is mixed. The company has stopped selling its most fuel-efficient cars—its sedans and hatchbacks—in the United States, but it is also investing $11 billion in new hybrid and electric vehicles.)
In April, the whole industry jammed the machine into reverse. The president of the Auto Alliance told Congress that he didn’t want the standards to freeze, even though he had once said the EPA should “withdraw” the rules. And carmakers wrote a new letter to the White House, which beseeched the president from the other direction: “Climate change is real, and we have a continuing role in reducing greenhouse gases and improving fuel efficiency.” “It’s sort of a case where the dog actually caught the bus,” Jack Gillis, a researcher at the Consumer Federation of America, told me at the time. “Now what are they going to do?”
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Even if California loses, automakers could float for years in legal uncertainty, as they fight a complicated and unflattering court battle with the country’s most populous state. Since carmakers plan their product lines years ahead of time, even a relatively quick duel could upset their business plans deep into the 2020s. Do automakers fear this uncertainty more than they fear the unchanged standards? It may be too late for them to answer that question: They already chose their ally when they met with Pruitt, when they sent pleading letters to the president, and when they cited junk science in official documents.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/car-industry-trump-epa/566738/
