But! But! But! Auto Execs Kiss Pruitt's Ass, Get CAFE Freeze, Now Whining About Their Success
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But at least automakers had what they wanted. They spent months making sad puppy-dog eyes in Pruitt’s direction. They had driven him around and cited junk science. And they had secured their victory: a total freeze of the standards. But then they balked.
Initially, Pruitt had planned to announce the CAFE rollback on April 3 at a Chevrolet dealer in Virginia. But other Chevy dealers hated that idea, and the administrator canceled the event. Soon other automakers had backed off the administrator. “We support increasing clean car standards through 2025 and are not asking for a rollback,” wrote Bill Ford, the executive chairman of the eponymous automaker, in a Medium post. A Honda vice president told The New York Times: “We didn’t ask for that.”
In May, Bainwol—who had once said “EPA should withdraw” the CAFE standards—told lawmakers that the government should continue to raise its fuel-efficiency standards every year. It was an implicit rebuke of the 2020 plan. In a separate letter to the White House, automakers said that “climate change is real and we have a continuing role in reducing greenhouse gases and improving fuel efficiency.” Four months earlier, auto lobbyists had suggested that climate scientists were all “tuning” their models; now, they echoed liberal lawn signs across the country.
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The carmakers are stuck with Trump—and I’m not sure they realized it would go like this. At the beginning of the administration, it was possible for certain aspects of corporate America to squint and tell themselves that they were getting a normal Republican administration. They seemed to think that they could bring their stridently phrased concerns to the EPA and get the rule changed—but changed in such a way that the public would not take notice. But this administration is so motivated by anti-regulatory fervor, so automatically against whatever Obama did, that they instead found themselves fighting off a rule change larger than they ever anticipated. And that could harm the automakers down the road—because they are not the only groups who hate CAFE. Environmentalists defend the CAFE rules now mostly because they’re better than no rules at all. But climate groups also thought CAFE’s mechanisms—and its “footprint” auto-adjustment especially—represented a kind of compromise with the industry. If carmakers and the Trump administration fillet the rules, then future Democrats will have little reason to concede ground to them. Lawmakers could come up with a scheme that lowers carbon pollution more efficiently: by implementing an economy-wide carbon tax, or by compensating consumers if they bought smaller cars.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/how-the-carmakers-trumped-themselves/562400/
