1/ On this week’s new episode: The inside story of how Trump’s EPA is rolling back Obama-era emissions standards to replace them with something that “doesn't pass the commonsense laugh test.” revealnews.org/episodes/scutt…
2/ The highlight of EPA engineer Jeff Alson’s career was a trip to the Oval Office in July 2011. They were celebrating Obama’s clean car initiative, which aimed to nearly double fuel efficiency to more than 54 miles a gallon by 2025.
3/ When President Trump announced he would gut Obama’s standards, Alson, who spent most of the last decade working on them, said he felt “like a good chunk of my career was kinda taken away from me.”
4/ Alson and others at the EPA were sidelined as the Trump administration drafted its scaled-back standards. The administration asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to take the lead.
5/ Alson retired last year. But he couldn’t help analyzing Trump’s proposal, rerunning #NHTSA models. What he found was, in his words, “the most spectacular modelling blunder I've ever seen in my 40 year career.”
6/ Basically, the Trump administration claimed that its proposal will save thousands of lives. How? Well, people would drive a lot less – and therefore get in fewer accidents.
7/ Alson says there’s no economic theory or technical study to back that up. blogs.edf.org/climate411/201…
8/ Alson did his own modeling and concluded the Trump administration “cooked the books” to support its proposal:
“It wasn’t just that they put their thumb on the scale,” he said. “They jumped up and down on the scale until they broke the scale.”
“It wasn’t just that they put their thumb on the scale,” he said. “They jumped up and down on the scale until they broke the scale.”
9/ Alson did this modeling work as a paid consultant to Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group.
10/ He presented his critique of Trump’s proposal at a public meeting in Dearborn, Michigan. Facing former colleagues, he called their work “the most biased and dishonest technical analysis” he’d ever seen.
environmentalprotectionnetwork.org/wp-content/upl…
environmentalprotectionnetwork.org/wp-content/upl…
11/ Experts from academia and activist groups said Alson’s analysis is spot on. The White House, EPA and Transportation Department? They wouldn’t comment on it.
12/ But Mandy Gunasekara, a former Trump appointee at EPA, confirmed that unlike the Obama administration, the Trump administration had the Transportation Department solely do the modeling.
13/ Gunasekara adds that in an upcoming analysis to be released with the final standards, NHTSA and EPA have fixed the problems highlighted by Alson and others. She says she’s confirmed that with two EPA insiders.
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