Trump to California: Suck a Tailpipe
The Trump administration has decided to revoke California’s power to set its own standards for vehicle emissions. There are three reasons why this is happening.
The obvious reasoning for this move by the “Environmental” Protection Agency is to encourage the consumption of dirty energy commodities. Fossil fuel producers and refiners, most of whom support Trump, have the opportunity for continued profits, even as their products shorten the time we have to stabilize the planet’s climate.
Weakening auto emissions standards nationwide dovetails with other administration actions, including rolling back rules governing coal-burning power plants and easing restrictions on energy companies governing leaks of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Never mind that tailpipe pollution is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
This is also about legitimizing executive power in the face of a deteriorating system of checks and balances. The White House is eager to move quickly to revoke California’s authority to set its standards, hoping the administration will get to defend the effort in the Supreme Court before the end of Trump’s first term.
Finally, telling California to “suck a tailpipe” is all about rolling back policies from the Obama era AND attacking left coast liberals. Because they can, even if it disrupts one of the country’s remaining manufacturing industries.
As Autowriter Matthew DeBord says in an op-ed at Business Insider:
His supporters in assorted dirty industries have no real stake in the dispute — it matters little to coal companies what Detroit does with its engineering — but California's status as something of an independent nation of blue (its $3 trillion annual GDP would rank it fifth among countries) provokes rage, as does the state's decades of commitment to its environmental equity, even dating back to the years when its was a Republican stronghold (even the California GOP couldn't deal with Los Angeles smog).
The dispute is also the best example yet of Trump's true economic colors. Trump is no businessman. If he ever was, he hasn't been for quite a while, as he morphed into a TV personality and brand-peddler. He's completely at sea when it comes to the global, 21st-century auto industry, which is vast and complicated but requires regulatory certainty in order to set vehicle investment and development timetables that cost billions and require years.
Thirteen other states follow California’s tighter standards, together representing roughly a third of the national auto market. When the administration announced plans to rollback the national standards, four automakers formalized their opposition to Mr. Trump’s plans by signing a deal with California to comply with tighter emissions standards.
https://twitter.com/GavinNewsom/status/1174350152343019521?s=20
The president has taken a page from the Mussolini handbook on governance by threatening those car makers with legal actions.
From an editorial at the Orange County Register:
On Friday, the Trump administration fought back. The Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to the California Air Resources Board, warning, “Congress has squarely vested the authority to set fuel economy standards for new motor vehicles, and nationwide standards for GHG (greenhouse gas) vehicle emissions, with the federal government, not with California or any other state.”
At the same time, the Justice Department sent letters to the four automakers that had signed on to California’s standards, informing them that an antitrust investigation into the deal is now underway.
An antitrust investigation is a wide-ranging probe into anti-competitive practices that can reach into every crevice of a company’s operations and last for years.
There is no small amount of irony in the timing of the President’s latest moves.
World leaders are converging on New York City this week for the United Nations climate action Summit. This may be the most consequential week in climate politics since Trump’s made moves to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement, the landmark treaty signed at the last big UN climate summit in 2015.
From the Guardian:
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, convened this week’s summit precisely because the US and most other countries remain far from honoring their Paris pledges to reduce heat-trapping emissions enough to prevent catastrophic climate disruption.
“Don’t bring a speech, bring a plan!” For months now, that’s what Guterres has been telling heads of state and government. Instead of the endless blah-blah-blah heard at most UN meetings, Guterres wants this summit to be more like “show-and-tell”, a meeting where governments share concrete and replicable examples of how they are cutting emissions and boosting resilience to the climate impacts already unfolding. As such, the summit aims to address a glaring deficiency of the Paris agreement. In part, because the agreement made emissions cuts voluntary, global emissions have continued to increase since 2015. On current trends, the earth is heading towards 3-5C of temperature rise – enough, scientists warn, to destroy civilization as we know it….
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who is the best-known face of the climate movement. Thunberg’s “School Strike For Climate”, begun a year ago in her home town of Stockholm, spread like wildfire around the world, inspiring hundreds of thousands of students to skip classes and take to the streets to demand that governments, in Thunberg’s words, “act like the house is on fire – because it is”.
Guterres has invited Thunberg to keynote a special one-day youth climate summit on 21 September and also to address world leaders at the plenary session on 23 September.
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1174333571848388609?s=20
Tomorrow’s post will focus on climate change activist actions in San Diego and elsewhere in the coming days.
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