Ed Perry, Op-Ed, Scranton Times Tribune
In 2014, President Obama proposed standards requiring cars and pickup trucks to get a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
His plan would not only reduce carbon pollution but save consumers money at the pump.
Unfortunately, President Trump, at the behest of the fossil fuel industry, proposes to roll back those standards.
In 2012, I testified at an Environmental Protection Agency hearing in support of Obama’s clean car standards. I was flanked by representatives of the auto industry who assured EPA that they could meet those standards. I am happy to report that, in fact, they can.
For example, my plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt gets 53 all-electric miles on a single charge before the backup gasoline engine kicks in. When confining our driving around town, we never buy gas and it only costs about a dollar’s worth of electricity to restore the 53 miles of range. Over the course of a year, gas and electric combined, we exceed the 54.5 mpg standard that the Trump administration proposes to roll back.
There are significant benefits to increasing fuel efficiency standards. Not only does it help reduce the impacts of the climate crises, but it saves consumers money. Gas and electricity for our plug-in hybrid costs us about $330 a year when driving 12,000 miles. In contrast, gas for a car getting 35 mpg would cost more than $1,000, about three times what we pay. Clearly, there are enormous consumer savings to be had by keeping these fuel efficiency standards. In fact, the clean car standards have already saved American drivers more than $86 billion and have saved Pennsylvanians $1.2 billion to date.
You might wonder why a lifelong fisherman and hunter would care about fuel efficiency standards.
As a sportsman, I see that our failure to tackle the climate crises already harms our wildlife heritage. The small, 1.5-degree temperature increase in the last 100 years is driving our state fish, state tree and state bird out of Pennsylvania. Often, when I hunt for deer, I’m dressed in shirt sleeves. When trout fishing out west, I often find the fishery closed due to high water temperatures and low flows. I’ve all but given up grouse hunting. Last year, we had 22 inches of rain above normal. This caused mosquito populations to explode, along with West Nile virus, which attacked our state bird, the ruffed grouse, driving it down to unprecedented low levels.
Torrential downpours across our country are no fluke. Climate scientists forecast global temperatures will increase somewhere between 7 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit within the next 80 years unless we significantly reduce carbon pollution. For every one degree of temperature increase, the atmosphere holds 4% more moisture. Just imagine putting an additional 28 percent to 44 percent more moisture into the atmosphere.
That is our future.
Ironically, even the car companies don’t support weakening fuel efficiency standards. In a recent letter to the president, 17 automakers cautioned that his plan to weaken tailpipe pollution standards threatened their profit margins and would produce untenable instability in their industry. They warned him that because California and 13 other states plan to implement the clean car standards as originally proposed, this would split the mileage requirements across the country, forcing the auto industry to make two different kinds of cars — a nightmare scenario for them.
What’s worse is that forcing the auto industry to continue to make gas guzzlers hurts their competitive stance in the world.
For example, China, India and most European countries have made significant commitments to producing electric vehicles. China is all-in on electric vehicles because of concerns about air quality. The Chinese plan to have 80 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030. India, France, Britain and Norway propose to ditch gasoline driven cars entirely by 2040. Ten other countries have set targets for the number of electric vehicles to be produced. So, gas vehicles made in the United States eventually will no longer be accepted outside our country.
Thankfully, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, of Moosic, has pushed back on the president’s plan to derail our move to clean, renewable energy. But he can’t do it alone. We need wholesale changes in Washington if we are to get our country to join the rest of the world in the quest to get away from fossil fuels, the driving force behind the climate crises.
Ed Perry writes for the National Wildlife Federation Climate Change Campaign
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