Blue state fuel standards ignor science and physics

Steve Milloy:

The original rationale for fuel efficiency standards, originally triggered by the 1970s energy crisis and fears of “peak oil," was put to rest about 10 years ago by the advent of fracking. Neither shortages nor dependence on foreign oil is really a consideration any longer.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court intervened on this issue in 2007, before the reality of fracking could catch up with the standards and their supporting bureaucracies. Massachusetts v. EPA paved the way for blue states and their environmental activist allies to hijack the fuel economy standard-setting process based on carbon dioxide emissions instead.

Exploiting that ruling and the 2009 government bailout of the car industry, the Obama administration cowed automakers in 2012 into swallowing a fuel efficiency schedule that would roughly double fuel economy by 2025.

This ambitious goal was a fantasy. Technology is not dinner — it can’t just be ordered. Fuel efficiency has improved by almost one-third since 2012, but it is nowhere near the Obama administration's edict and has no chance of getting there.

So in 2018, the Trump administration proposed to freeze the standards essentially where they are now. It justified the freeze with improvements in car safety that slightly lower standards permit, reductions in traffic fatalities, reduction in vehicle costs, and the lack of discernible impacts on the environment and climate between the two levels of fuel efficiency.

As with all things Trump, blue states and their green allies are having none of it. A host of blue states and environmentalist groups have sued the administration over its rollback of Obama-era standards. Now the new standards will begin a tortuous multiyear journey through the federal court system.

The rule-making documents, related analyses, and comments are thousands of pages long — practically beyond the comprehension and patience of anyone but regulatory mandarins who have spent their careers working on the standards. All that aside, the dispute comes down to this: Plaintiff states want an average annual increase in fuel economy to be on the order of 2.7%. The Trump administration has determined that a 1.5% annual increase is more than enough.

In 2012, the Obama administration set fuel economy standards to increase by 5% per year. But because carmakers couldn't achieve this standard through technology alone, there were only two options for meeting the Obama standard: light-weighing cars and selling more electric vehicles.

Lighter cars are less safe and increase the risk of accident fatalities. No one disputes this — it’s just the physics of heavy and light objects crashing into each other. But in its 2012 rule-making, the Obama administration was forced by its own political goals to pretend that making small cars lighter would have no impact on safety.

Electric vehicles are, so far, not a promising option for carmakers. They struggle to sell the smaller, less convenient, more expensive cars. Only about half of current electric vehicle owners say they would consider another one, according to a survey commissioned by the Department of Transportation.

These realities are being ignored by the media in favor of hyperventilation from ex-Obama officials saying desperate things to influence the ongoing litigation.

...

For all their talk about science, the blue state leaders ignore it when it comes to fuel requirements on vehicles.  The situation will become even worse if Biden is elected and starts pushing this garbage again at the same time he is taking steps to reduce fossil fuel production.  Democrats are creating a looming disaster for vehicle manufacturers and consumers.