The Trump administration said weaker fuel standards would save lives. EPA experts disagree.

An analysis by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, EPA experts said, used faulty assumptions.

Staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency strongly criticized the logic behind a recent move to loosen future gas mileage rules for cars, at one point requesting that the EPA’s name and logo be removed from a key regulatory report.

Documents released Tuesday provide a window into a tense technical battle between experts at two separate government agencies — the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an agency of the Transportation Department — and show that just months or even weeks before the rollout of a massive new policy proposal, the two agencies behind it had major disagreements.

The contested policy represents one of the Trump administration’s single largest reversals of an Obama-era move to fight climate change by cutting polluting emissions from vehicle tailpipes. New evidence of an internal dispute will probably strengthen the hand of California and other states suing over the proposed changes. If finalized, the freeze would translate to an average fleetwide fuel economy of about 37 miles per gallon, rather than rising to more than 51 mpg by 2025.

“EPA’s technical issues have not been addressed, and the analysis performed … does not represent what EPA considers to be the best, or the most up-to-date, information available to EPA,” agency expert William Charmley wrote in a critique less than two months before the proposal was released.


More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/08/15/trump-administration-said-weaker-fuel-standards-would-save-lives-epa-experts-disagree/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8acd6b22cb11



Traffic heads eastbound on Route 50 in Bowie, Md. Internal documents show the Environmental Protection Agency questioned the Trump administration’s finding that freezing Obama-era mileage standards would make drivers safer. (Susan Walsh/AP)