Environment Virginia: Don’t roll back fuel economy standards

Americans rallied at the White House Friday to deliver a citizen citation to President Trump for rolling back fuel economy standards that are working to protect human health and the environment.

Despite the many dangers of rolling back these standards, from global warming to negative public health effects, the Trump administration is once again going the wrong way on clean cars.

President Trump met Friday with the CEOs of major automakers to discuss his administration’s plans to significantly weaken America’s clean car standards. The meeting comes on the heels of last week’s lawsuit filed by the attorneys general in 17 states and Washington, D.C. against the Environmental Protection Agency after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced his plans to weaken the standards.

“Rolling back America’s clean car standards is a massive blow to human health and the environment, and it takes us in the wrong direction,” said Andrea McGimsey, Senior Director of Global Warming Solutions for Environment Virginia. “President Trump and the EPA should work with California, the automakers and other interested parties to continue going forward, not backward on clean cars.”

If fully phased in, the clean car standards are projected to save 6 billion metric tons of carbon pollution and 12 billion barrels of oil by 2025.

In January of 2017, the EPA concluded that America’s clean car standards were working and achievable, and should not be weakened. But now, without any change in the facts, the current administration is reversing that decision, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that supports keeping the standards in place.

The American public supports cleaner cars and wants to keep moving forward. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans want current fuel efficiency standards to remain in place, and we’ve seen tens of thousands of citizens and hundreds of health experts voice their support for cleaner cars.

“It’s past time to clean up our transportation sector, the nation’s largest source of carbon pollution. We need to move forward to clean up our cars, not pull a U-turn on the progress we are set to achieve,” said McGimsey.