Trump Preparing To Reverse Obama’s EPA Fuel Economy Mandate

 

By MICHAEL BASTASCH – The Daily Caller

The Trump administration is preparing to reverse a last-minute Obama administration decision to keep in place regulations to increase fuel economy for new cars to the equivalent of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

A source told InsideEPA “action on the mid-term review” is expected for “next week, essentially to put the EPA back on the original schedule.”

The decision will reopen a mid-term review of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Transportation Department (DOT) fuel economy standards meant to tackle global warming.

The Obama administration released its determination to keep the fuel economy mandate ahead of schedule, surprising the auto industry and sparking criticism from the right. EPA issued its decision on Jan. 13, days before the Senate held a confirmation hearing for Elaine Chao, the future transportation secretary.

 …

Automakers petitioned President Donald Trump to reverse the fuel mandate. A high mandate would “threaten future production levels, putting hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as a million jobs at risk” auto executives wrote in a letter sent to Trump in January.

In 2012, EPA and DOT pushed a fuel economy regulation requiring cars built in 2025 get 54.5 miles per gallon. The Obama administration said the rule would cut American fuel costs and global warming emissions.

Fuel economy, or CAFE, standards were put in place by Congress in 1975 to increase fuel efficiency, but former President Barack Obama unilaterally increased the mandate to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Obama previously set a standard of 35 miles per gallon for cars built between 2012 and 2016.

The draft mid-term review released by EPA and DOT in July found cars would likely fall short of Obama’s 54.5 miles per gallon mandate. The Obama administration responded by saying 54.5 miles per gallon was a goal, not a requirement.

Climate scientists have pointed out the fuel economy standards will do little for global warming — one of the stated goals of the program. Cato Institute climate scientists estimated — using EPA models — fuel efficiency standards would avert 0.016 degrees Celsius of projected warming.

Automakers say the accelerated fuel economy mandates add $3,000 to the price of a new car, outweighing projected fuel savings. The conservative Heritage Foundation found fuel economy mandates have added $6,200 to the price of a new car.

In total, EPA and DOT fuel standards for light-duty vehicles

Statistician trashes Obama cost estimates of climate: ‘Manipulated by regulators & bureaucrats’

Testifying before Congress, Ph.D. statistician Kevin Dayaratna trashes the Obama era Interagency Working Group (IWG) estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) — a metric to quantify economic damages associated with carbon dioxide emissions used to justify increased government regulations.
DR. DAYARATNA: “There are a variety of issues with these SCCs– the IAMs (Integrated Assessment Models) associated with these SCCs. The most fundamental issue is that they are extremely sensitive to very, very reasonable changes in assumptions. As I was referring to using the time horizon to 300 years, if you shift that to 150 years, which is still unrealistic, you get a drastically different estimate of the SCC. The discount rate– if you use a 7 percent discount rate, as mandated by the OMB(Office of Management and Budget), under the FUND model you will get a negative Social Cost of Carbon. And, the policy implication there would be that we shouldn’t be taxing carbon dioxide emissions but subsidizing it.”

Hearing: At what cost? Examining the Social Cost of Carbon
Subcommittee on Environment
US House Science Committee
February 28, 2017…

Career EPA employees to fight Trump: ‘We will resist in whatever way, shape or form that we can’

SNL

EPA whistleblower: ‘We will resist’

By Annalee Armstrong

Thursday, March 02, 2017

When Scott Pruitt stepped up to the lectern at the U.S. EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., for his first speech to agency staff as administrator, he sought to establish himself as a human being. He told the employees of his love of baseball, his respect for the law and how he intends to lead by listening to, and learning from, his staff.

He also acknowledged the negative press that plagued him during and following his confirmation hearing and urged his new employees to keep an open mind about his leadership.

“I look forward to sharing the rest of the story with you as we spend time together,” Pruitt said.

But that does not appear to be the message employees took away from the meeting, according to former EPA staffer Kyla Bennett, who now works with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization that supports EPA staffers with internal concerns. Instead, staff felt the speech was worse than they could have imagined, given that it comes from an administrator who has unapologetically sued the agency 14 times and has pledged to rapidly repeal several regulations that were the work of the very staff he now oversees.

“Morale has never been lower than it is now,” said Bennett, who leads the New England chapter of the organization and in recent weeks also took on responsibility for coordinating communications with EPA employees nationwide. “Administrator Pruitt’s speech did absolutely nothing to put their minds at rest…. If anything, it made them even more fearful.”

[…]

Moreover, rumors are running rampant at the agency, adding to the confusion and job security concerns, according to Bennett. She said one of those rumors was that employees would be forced to turn over any documents with Trump’s name on them to see if any negative comments about the new president were shared among staffers.

“Do I think that will really happen? Probably not. But the fact that they’re worried about stuff like that shows that they are really frightened,” Bennett said. “Things have been said and done to them that make them really, really fear for not only their livelihoods but the fate of the environment in this country.”

[…]

Newer employees opposed to Trump’s environmental agenda, especially those who have never lived through a presidential transition, also face an internal struggle about their future …

Trump Takes Hatchet To EPA

President Trump has launched the opening salvo in his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Trump is tearing into the EPA’s budget by a reported 24 percent, which if approved by Congress would slash the agency’s $8.1 billion budget to George H.W. Bush-era levels and reduce the EPA’s workforce by one-fifth.

Source: Trump Takes Hatchet To EPA

Science behind the video Polar Bear Scare Unmasked – updated paper now available

Announcing the publication today of Version 2 of my paper that tests the hypothesis that polar bear population declines result from rapid declines in summer sea ice, updated with recently available data. Version 2 provides the scientific support for the information presented in the GWPF video published yesterday, “ Polar Bear Scare Unmasked: The Sage of a Toppled Global Warming Icon ” (copied below). [The graphic above was created by me from the title page and two figures from the paper] Crockford, S.J. 2017 V2.

Source: Science behind the video Polar Bear Scare Unmasked – updated paper now available

Claim: ‘Your turkey sandwich is contributing to global warming’

Here’s some CO2-free food for thought.

One single loaf of bread contributes as much to global warming as one pound of carbon dioxide, according to a new study published Wednesday in Nature Plants.

Food production and consumption is the cause of approximately one-third of total greenhouse gas emissions. This factoid led a research team at University of Sheffield to delve into the supply chain process of bread.

“We found in every loaf there is embodied global warming,” Liam Goucher, lead author of the study, said in a statement. He added that consumers are likely aware of the environmental impacts of a product’s plastic wrapping, but not of the product itself.

The scientists analyzed a single loaf of bread’s CO2 contributions, including growing and harvesting the wheat, milling the grain, producing the flour to baking the bread and finally, packaging the loaf.

Once the ingredients for a 1.8 lb. loaf of bread are grown and harvested and the finished product is baked and wrapped, the atmosphere will have received 0.4 pounds of CO2 from baking, .06 lbs from milling and a whopping 0.56 lbs from the fertilizer used to harvest the wheat.

Wheat is fertilized with ammonium nitrate, which releases N20, nitrous oxide, into the atmosphere. N20 is a greenhouse gas that some experts say is 300 worse than C02 in terms of trapping heat. Global agriculture uses more than 110 million tons of fertilizers a year.

Cutting back on fertilizer might help, but that means slashing wheat production, which means less food. And the study notes that currently, there aren’t any incentives in place to encourage cutbacks.…

Arctic ice extent ‘nearly identical’ to recent years — While Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain

Alarmists’ Arctic Nightmare Continues

While climate alarmists have been telling endless lies about record heat and melting in the Arctic and Greenland this winter, thick ice has been pushing into the East Siberian, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas – which determine the summer minimum extent.

DMI Modelled ice thickness

Ice extent is nearly identical to all recent years.

Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

And Greenland is blowing away all records for ice gain.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

DELINGPOLE: Polar Bears Are a Pest – Time to End Their ‘Threatened’ Status

By James Delingpole:

The world’s exploding polar bear population which has now reached record highs of 30,000.
30,000 polar bears is a lot. As someone else remarked (remind me where and I’ll link to it), when Al Gore was born the population was just 5,000. Even as recently as 2005 it was estimated at no more than 22,500.

When the population of something explodes six-fold in 70 years that’s a sign that it’s doing pretty well, right? In fact, frankly, at that point it ceases to be a species in any kind of danger and starts to look more like a pest.

So why do the greenies persist in treating it like it’s a rare and precious species on the verge of extinction due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM)?

This is the question asked and answered by the best short video you will ever see about the polar bear non-problem.

It has been made by Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and it calls for the US Administration to reassess the polar bear’s (utterly bogus) classification as a “threatened” species.

As the film makes clear, the polar bear is not “threatened” and hasn’t been for many decades (not since hunting was mostly banned). When in May 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this was a political gesture not a scientific one.

The flimsy justification for the polar bear’s “threatened” status was the dramatic decline in summer sea ice which – so the fashionable theory ran – would render polar bears unable to feed because whenever they pursued seals they’d collapse through the thin ice.

This is a plausible theory so long as you know nothing about the feeding habits, behaviour and seasonal cycle of polar bears.

Polar bears, it turns out, do most of their feeding in early spring when they consume 8 months’ worth of their total food needs.

Mostly, they eat ring seals which are abundant in spring but have largely disappeared from the bears’ hunting grounds by summer, leaving only the lest tasty and harder-to-catch adult bearded and harp seals.

To be clear, polar bears are not “threatened”, “vulnerable” or otherwise “endangered” – and have not been at any time during the long period in which they have been exploited by snake-oil-selling greenies as the poster child for man-made …