W's Anti-Regulatory Czar Led Study Showing That Obama's CAFE Rules A Strong Net Plus For Americans
As the Trump administration works to rewrite and weaken clean car standards, the targeted Obama-era rules received an unexpected boost from an unlikely source. A new study by President George W. Bush’s anti-regulatory czar found that the current fuel efficiency and emissions standards are good for the economy as a whole, mostly due to the significant savings that American drivers would see at the pump.
“The positive effects on the economy are ultimately much larger in magnitude than the negative impacts, primarily because the savings in expenditures on fuel are quite large relative to the vehicle price premium,” according to the study published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
The study itself was commissioned by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (or Auto Alliance), a major trade group of American carmakers, which once lobbied hard (relying in part on climate science denial talking points) for a rollback to the standards. That was before the group actually saw the Trump administration’s extreme proposal to freeze the standards at 2021 levels and revoke California’s right to set its own standards, after which the group warned of a “regulatory nightmare.” At risk are the current fuel efficiency targets of over 50 miles per gallon (or roughly 35 miles per gallon in real-world driving conditions). These standards would nearly double the fleet-wide average fuel economy by 2025.
This latest research was led by economist John Graham, who worked under the second President Bush to cut regulations as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). “We were thinking that 2012 Obama-era standards might be harmful to the economy in a low fuel-price environment,” Graham said in an email to E&E News. “We were surprised by the finding.”
Graham’s research also concluded that the Trump administration’s proposal to freeze the standards would ultimately harm the economy and cost drivers considerably more out of pocket.
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Graham’s study, funded by the Auto Alliance, confirms that the only true beneficiaries of Trump’s auto standard rollbacks would be companies who produce, refine, and sell the petroleum products that power conventional internal combustion vehicles. The CEO of Marathon Petroleum essentially said as much, while boasting to investors recently that the proposed Trump rollback would result in an additional 350,000 to 400,000 barrels of gasoline per day consumed by American drivers.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/03/27/john-graham-trump-fuel-efficiency-standard-rollback-hurt-economy