Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler accused California’s top air pollution regulator Mary Nichols on Thursday of being “unwilling to be a good faith negotiator” over fuel efficiency standards that the Trump administration wants to roll back.
Wheeler said to Nichols, in a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner, that her claim that the oil industry swayed the proposed rollback “is beneath the responsibilities of the substantial position she holds.”
Wheeler sent the letter ahead of a blockbuster hearing hosted by two House committees at which EPA’s air office chief Bill Wehrum testified about the administration’s proposed weakening of Obama-era fuel efficiency rules. Nichols, the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, is slated to testify on a separate panel Thursday afternoon.
Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the panels hosting the hearing, launched an investigation Wednesday into whether the oil and refinery industries influenced the proposed weakening of auto efficiency rules. The Democrats are seeking to obtain documents from Marathon Petroleum, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, American Legislative Exchange Council, Energy4Us, and Americans for Prosperity showing their potential involvement in the rule.
“This rollback picks one winner — the oil industry — while everyone else loses,” said Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, predicting uncertainty for automakers and consumers spending more on gasoline to power less efficient cars.
Wheeler’s attacks on Nichols comes as leading U.S. automakers have made an eleventh-hour push to stop the Trump administration from dramatically weakening Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, warning doing so would bring “untenable” uncertainty and lead to drawn-out litigation.
Automakers want the Trump administration to return to the negotiating table with California, which, with more than a dozen other states, is poised to sue the administration in order to enforce stricter auto pollution rules to limit carbon emissions from transportation, the highest-emitting economic sector.
The Trump administration has proposed revoking a Clean Air Act waiver that California has, and more than a dozen other states follow, allowing it to set vehicle emission standards tougher than federal rules.
The EPA, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, last August proposed freezing Obama-era fuel efficiency rules for cars and light trucks, instead of raising them each year, between model years 2020 and 2026. It is expected to finalize the rule in the coming months.
Wheeler, and other administration officials, demonstrated little appetite for continued negotiations Thursday. Wheeler, in his letter, said that Nichols, after several meetings and conversations, offered a counterproposal to him that he did not view as a compromise, which he said would have kept the Obama-era standards while allowing one extra year of compliance.
Nichols, in her prepared testimony Thursday, said that “EPA’s professional staff and California’s engineers were cut out of this proposal’s development” and argued the oil industry had undue influence on “former oil and coal industry lobbyists and lawyers who now work in leadership at the agency.”
Later, she told the committee that Wheeler’s accusations were untrue. She called his letter “shocking.”
“I would state categorically we proposed areas in which we would be willing to compromise with the administration and we never were told precisely what was wrong with any of those proposals,” Nichols said. “We were simply told they were inadequate and that we somehow failed to do our job by not bringing a proposal that the administration found to be acceptable.”
Wehrum, in his testimony, downplayed internal documents showing EPA career staff questioning the assumptions of a safety analysis that NHTSA conducted justifying the weaker fuel economy standards.
These are “complicated issues,” he said, and “it is not surprising at all” there are disagreements.
The Trump administration argues the tougher Obama rules would make newer cars unaffordable, forcing drivers to use older, less safe, and environmentally unfriendly vehicles. The administration also says the previous standards are unfeasible considering consumers in recent years have preferred buying gas guzzling SUVs.
Republican lawmakers agree with that premise.
“We should not have a fractured marketplace with policies catering to urban customers,” said Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill. “In rural America, we like big things. We like big trucks. We like big engines.”
Democrats say the weaker rules would stifle U.S. innovation of zero-emitting electric vehicles, harming efforts to combat climate change.
Automakers, who prefer flexibility in the Obama rules, not an outright rejection, consider the Trump plan too extreme.
Auto groups have said they hope to maintain a common set of rules with year-over-year increases in efficiency that California would agree to follow, allowing automakers to sell the same models in every state, and avoiding the uncertainty of prolonged litigation.
“A reasonable observer would be forgiven for seeing an administration so blinded by contempt for its predecessors and so willing to hurt consumers to support oil companies at any cost that it would defy science and common sense to move forward with a proposal with near universal condemnation from stakeholders,” said Rep. Paul Tonko, D-N.Y.
