Trump says making cars burn less fuel is dangerous, but experts question the logic

With that logic, the Trump administration made a choice with its proposal, announced Thursday, to aggressively weaken Obama-era fuel efficiency rules for cars and light trucks, deciding that road safety is more important than the potential harms of allowing vehicles to continue burning more fuel.

The EPA, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said its preferred outcome would freeze fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions targets at 2020 levels through 2026, instead of raising them each year as previously anticipated.

The agencies argued the Obama administration’s program, set in 2012, forcing automakers to double the fuel economy of their vehicles to reach an average of roughly 54 miles per gallon by 2025, would make cars and trucks more expensive and encourage people to keep driving older, less safe models.

A freeze in the fuel standards could prevent 1,000 fatalities from crashes annually, and save Americans an average of roughly $2,340 for every new vehicle purchased, the administration claims.

But some experts question the Trump administration’s logic, and argue it is dramatically under-selling the benefits of tough fuel efficiency requirements.

“To imply that if you try to clean up the car and truck fleet it creates risks for Americans, that framing is scary, and the data shows it’s wrong,” argued Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School who served as counselor for energy and climate change in the Obama White House. “All of the data says you can have both safety and fuel efficiency.”

The Obama administration argued that mandating more fuel-efficient vehicles would improve public health, counter climate change, and save consumers money without risking safety. It estimated that stricter standards would lead to about 100 fewer auto-related deaths.

Experts say the vastly different conclusions show how an administration’s assumptions of hard-to-interpret numbers can make a major difference in the policy it pursues.

“You can make numbers say whatever you want them to,” said Rebecca Lindland, an executive analyst for Kelley Blue Book.

To bolster its safety argument, the Trump administration discounts public health and climate benefits that can result from tougher fuel efficiency standards.

“More gasoline will be burned,” Freeman said. “What are the public health effects of the gasoline burned, and the carbon that goes with it? You can’t omit the factors that go against your preferred outcome.”

EPA and NHTSA estimate its preferred proposal would increase U.S. fuel consumption by roughly half a million barrels of oil per day, increasing global carbon dioxide concentrations by 0.65 parts per million — an amount the agencies consider “negligible.”

“The highway safety numbers swamp the environment numbers,” Wehrum said.

But the carbon emissions implications of freezing fuel efficiency standards can be felt more powerfully over time. A study released Thursday by the Rhodium Group, an independent research provider, included a worst case scenario in which, by 2035, the U.S. increase in annual carbon dioxide emissions ends up being larger than today’s total annual emissions of 82 percent of the world’s countries.

“In the context of the global effort to address climate change, this would be a pretty meaningful setback,” the report said.

Transportation recently surpassed power plants as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., with the biggest share coming from cars and trucks.

Supporters of the Trump administration counter that automakers don’t need tough government mandates to make cars more efficient.

“The answer to pollution is to make new cars more affordable,” said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who led Trump’s EPA transition team. “If freezing the standards makes cars more affordable, that will help pollution tremendously because new cars are incredibly clean except for some diesels.”

Lindland agrees automakers have little room left to innovate without increasing their costs and consumers’ prices.

“The Obama administration’s ramp up was very steep, and it was going to be very expensive, in part because we have already wrung a lot of the technology improvements out of the fleet,” Lindland said. “There is only so much more they can do without becoming very expensive.”

Automakers are also challenged because consumers aren’t buying electric and hydro-electric cars to the extent that the Obama administration assumed. The purchase of more electric vehicles would have helped bring down the average fuel economy of the fleet.

Also, lower fuel prices have encouraged consumers to buy less fuel-efficient SUVs and light trucks.

“If consumer demand was growing for hybrids or EVs, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because the investments would make sense,” Lindland said. “Consumers would be speaking with their money.”

Critics, however, say the Trump administration is employing misleading math in other areas.

For example, while the administration likes to tout the $2,000 savings on the sticker price for buying a new car with weaker standards, consumers would also spend more over time on fuel.

The Trump administration’s analysis shows that drivers will spend between $800 and $1,450 more for fuel over the life of new cars and trucks if it freezes fuel efficiency targets.

Wehrum acknowledged the trickiness of balancing the numbers, and the challenge ahead as the Trump administration takes public comments for 60 days before issuing a final rule later this year.

“This is complicated stuff,” Wehrum said. “We at EPA want the most clean, efficient cars that can be produced. NHTSA wants a program that promotes energy security and highway safety. We need to find that sweet spot.”