October 26, 2018 – Today, the Emmett Clinic submitted comments opposing the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule. This rule would freeze greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks, thereby undermining one of the main pillars of U.S. efforts to address climate change.
The comments focus on the agencies’ misleading discussion of the proposal’s impact on climate change. Even though the U.S. transportation sector is responsible for 28% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the agencies dismiss the climate impacts of their proposal to freeze the emissions standards from 2021 to 2026 as “small.” The comments spell out how the climate impacts projected in the agencies’ own draft Environmental Impact Statement portend significant, adverse harms to public health, the economy, and the natural world; that the scientific consensus points to the immediate and ongoing need for continuing, incremental reductions in GHG emissions across all sectors of the U.S. economy; and that even if the Proposal’s impacts were properly characterized as “small,” even small increases in GHG emissions can have major impacts.
The Clinic filed the comments on its own behalf and on behalf of Professor Michael Oppenheimer, Director of Princeton University’s Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy and lead author for the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Dr. Philip Duffy, President and Executive Director of the Woods Hole Research Center.
The link to the comments is here: Comments on Proposed Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule, 83 Fed. Reg. 42,986 (Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0283)