‘We Knew They Had Cooked the Books’
Study coauthored by Benjamin Leard, Virginia McConnell, and Joshua Linn is cited in The Atlantic article on Trump’s attempted rollback of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)-EPA vehicle regulations.
The study "Flawed analyses of US auto fuel economy standards," coauthored by Benjamin Leard, Virginia McConnell, and Joshua Linn, was cited in The Atlantic article on Trump’s attempted rollback of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)-EPA vehicle regulations. Listed below is a quote from the article:
"Trump’s official justification for SAFE is honeycombed with errors. The most dramatic is that NHTSA’s model mixed up supply and demand: The agency calculated that as cars got more expensive, millions more people would drive them, and the number of traffic accidents would increase, my reporting shows. This error—later dubbed the “phantom vehicles” problem—accounted for the majority of incorrect costs in the SAFE study that the Trump administration released in 2018. It is what made SAFE look safe.
Once this and other major mistakes are fixed, all of SAFE’s safety benefits vanish, according to a recent peer-reviewed analysis in Science. If SAFE is adopted into law, American traffic deaths could actually increase, carbon pollution would soar, and global warming would speed up.
In other words, SAFE isn’t actually safe—and the Trump administration based its rollback on flawed math."
Read the full article here.
