E&E News: “EPA Tied Its Climate Rollback to Low Oil Prices. Then Came the Iran War.”
RFF Senior Fellow Joshua Linn comments on the complicated relationship between high gas prices and the Trump administration’s vehicle regulation rollbacks.
“The longer high prices remain, the more consumers end up paying for Trump’s regulatory rollbacks, said Joshua Linn, a senior fellow at the think tank Resources for the Future.
‘If prices rise this year and hypothetically decrease in six months, then the effect on the cost of eliminating the standards is going to be pretty small,’ he said. ‘If, though, this contributes or leads to subsequent chaos in the Middle East and instability in global oil markets and prices are high for a long period of time, that’s totally different.’
A 50-cent gas price increase over the next 10 years, for example, could “add up to tens of billions of dollars in extra costs of eliminating the standards,” he said.”
