Monday, March 20, 2017

Official resistance: Nine states and DC intervene in lawsuit over enhanced fuel efficiency standards

Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades) · Saturday, March 18, 2017, 2:41 pm

In the wake of Pr*sident Donald Trump’s unsurprising announcement Wednesday in Detroit that he is ordering a review of enhanced fuel economy standards established by the Obama administration, nine states and the District of Columbia are stepping in to block the action. Reid Wilson reports:

That suit, brought by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, was filed Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The filing would allow [California and New York] to defend the mandates, which will require auto manufacturers to hit fuel economy standards of 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025.
“California is forward-leaning,” Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) said Wednesday. “For us, clean air, good-paying jobs and quality of life go hand-in-hand. For us, there’s no turning back in the fight against pollution.”
The AAM had urged the Trump regime—specifically Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt—to revisit an upgrade of the fuel efficiency standards, known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). These were originally imposed in 1975 because of the oil embargo of that era. The Obama administration negotiated a phase-in of the upgraded standards with a beleaguered auto industry in 2010-2011, and they took effect in 2012.

In its “mid-term review” of the federal standards prescribed for the 2022-25 model years, the EPA determined in January 2017 that the record supports imposing even stricter standards, but it chose “to retain the current standards to provide regulatory certainty for the auto industry.” But that wasn’t good enough for the industry, whose leaders saw some hope of changing matters in their favor with the arrival of Trump and his fossil fuel-saturated marionettes at the White House.

Source
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/rcoWyKMlF2Q/-Nine-states-and-D-C-intervene-in-lawsuit-challenging-Obama-s-enhanced-fuel-efficiency-standards

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