Trump and the CAFE Proposal: Disappearing Fuel Cost Savings
WASHINGTON, DC—Today, Resources for the Future (RFF) posted the sixth in a multi-part blog series about the Trump administration’s recent proposal to freeze federal fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards. The new installment is: The Case of the Disappearing Fuel Cost Savings, by authors RFF Senior Fellow Joshua Linn and Research Assistant Justine Huetteman.
The new blog post begins: “Expected fuel cost savings are at the center of the Trump administration’s proposal to weaken the fuel economy and greenhouse gas (GHG) standards. Two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) under the Obama administration estimated that the value of the fuel cost savings from higher fuel economy would vastly exceed the costs of adding fuel-saving technologies to meet the standards. Last month, the same agencies under Trump estimated that fuel cost savings from the Obama standards would be just half the costs of raising fuel economy. According to the new analysis, total benefits of weakening the standards would exceed the total costs even without accounting for traffic accidents. In this post, we try to figure out why the analyses from each administration’s agencies differ so drastically in only two years.”
Read the full blog post: The Case of the Disappearing Fuel Cost Savings.
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