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State AGs Must Win the Fight on Cars and Coal

Cars on a highway during daytime

I made the point in a recent Slate op-ed that despite all the hype, the Trump Administration’s “deregulatory” push remains at the starting gate. After trying for two years to avoid its legal obligation to implement existing environmental rules, the Administration finally is pivoting and putting out proposed replacement rules for comment.

In filings submitted by state attorneys general over the last couple of weeks, we are now seeing how high the stakes are in this fight.

At issue are arguably the two most consequential environmental protections put in place by the Obama Administration: The Clean Car Standards, under which the auto industry agreed to steadily improve fuel efficiency standards through 2026; and the Clean Power Plan, which called on the coal industry, working with flexible tools given to state authorities, to reduce harmful carbon emissions.

As the State Impact Center has highlighted, coalitions of 21 State AGs and 19 State AGs filed comments on October 26 and October 31, respectively, regarding the proposed replacements to those rules. As laid out in those extensive comments, each of the proposals suffers from multiple factual, analytical and legal errors that make them extremely vulnerable to judicial review.

While the rules each deserve serious attention, the combined impact of the Trump proposals is particularly striking. In terms of climate change, for example, the transportation sector and coal sectors together are the largest sources of destructive greenhouse gases in our entire economy. By killing off the Clean Car Standards and the Clean Power Plan, the Administration is abandoning any pretense of combating climate change and trying to blunt its destructive impacts. Instead of reducing emissions, the replacement rules would give the most serious climate polluters a pass, with the rollback of national Clean Car Standards increasing emissions by an estimated 8 billion tons of CO2 by 2026, and the rollback of the Clean Power Plan adding as many as 402 million additional tons of CO2 by 2030.

And then there are the direct adverse health effects that the combined rollbacks would have on the American people. The Administration’s own analysis for the auto and coal replacement rules shows that the additional particulates, smog-forming chemicals and other conventional pollutants would cause nearly 4,000 premature deaths and 65,000 additional respiratory ailments, while exacerbating asthma symptoms for more than 24 million Americans, including 6.3 million children. In its Clean Power Plan rulemaking, the EPA also predicted that the increase in preventable deaths and illnesses would disproportionately impact low-income communities and communities of color.

In sum, this isn’t a sterile “deregulation” exercise. The Trump Administration is blatantly choosing not to control our nation’s largest sources of climate and conventional pollution, at the cost of American lives and the health of the planet.