Were Going to Work on the Cafe Standards So You Can Make Cars in America Again
On its way out the door in January, the Obama assistants rushed to lock in the Environmental Protection Agency's Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards at 54.5 miles per gallon for low-cal duty vehicles by 2025. The final determination as well calculated that the college CAFE standards would salvage American drivers nigh $100 billion in fuel costs by 2025.
Today, President Donald Trump told a cheering audition of auto industry workers in Michigan: "Nosotros're going to work on the CAFE standards so you can make cars in America over again. We're going to help companies so they are going to help you lot. Nosotros're going to be the automobile majuscule of the world again."
New EPA administrator Scott Pruitt also appear today that the bureau in coordination with the Department of Transportation's (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Assistants (NHTSA) will reconsider the last conclusion and decide by April 1, 2022 whether the Obama-era CAFE standards will stand up. The reconsideration of the stringent Cafe standards is taking place at the request of American automakers who argue in a February letter to Pruitt that they are unachievable using currently foreseen automotive technologies. In its letter of the alphabet the Brotherhood of Auto Manufacturers asserts that the Obama adminstration'southward EPA final determination is "riddled with indefensible assumptions" regarding available technologies, consumer credence, technology affordability, and industry employment effects. The Brotherhood is not asking for a dissimilar terminal determination "at this fourth dimension." The group but wants the agency resume the evaluation "consistent with the timetable embodied in the EPA'southward ain regulations."
The environmental antechamber is not happy. "Americans don't want to return to days of more than pollution and higher fuel costs. They want a make clean, efficient economy. Rolling back vehicle fuel standards would make Americans spend more at the pump, leaving them with less for their families and basic needs," declared Kristin Igusky, Climate Plan Associate at the World Resource Institute in a statement. "In compelling a review of these standards, the administration is creating more uncertainty and blocking progress toward cleaner, more efficient vehicles for America."
Whatever else they practice, CAFE standards especially hurt the poor. As I reported in Jan:
In a new study contrasting the effects on consumers of energy efficiency standards versus energy taxes, the Georgetown economist Arik Levinson notes that both energy efficiency standards and free energy taxes part as a regressive tax, taking a larger percent of a lower income and a smaller percentage of a higher income. His analysis aims to notice out which is more regressive—in other words, which is worse for poor Americans.
Levinson cites before research that estimates a gasoline tax would cost 71 pct less than the comparable CAFE policy per gallon of fuel saved. Meanwhile, a 2013 study calculates that Cafe standards cost more than half dozen times as much as a corresponding gas tax for the same reduction in fuel consumption. In other words, if policy makers desire people to use less fuel and drive more fuel-efficient cars, taxing gasoline is a much cheaper way to achieve that goal than mandating car fuel efficiency. Levinson concludes that "efficiency standards are, ironically, inefficient."
I have long been a critic of Buffet standards. Back in 2009, for example, I concluded that Obama's proposed Buffet standards operate as an inefficient stealth taxation on driving. Information technology's inefficient considering drivers pay more, car companies make less coin, and state and federal governments don't get any extra revenues. If activists and politicians want Americans to drive more fuel-efficient cars, the simple and honest thing to practice would be to substantially heighten gasoline taxes concluded a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report. Ultimately, I argued, setting CAFE standards is just a way for cowardly politicians to avoid telling their fellow citizens that they should pay more for the privilege of driving. If that's what our political leaders think, and so they should just be honest and come out in favor of higher fuel taxes.
Source: https://reason.com/2017/03/15/trump-administration-to-review-obama-era/
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