For Immediate Release
February 14, 2012
WASHINGTON D.C. — The Institute for Energy Research filed a comment yesterday with the Environmental Protection Agency regarding a proposed rule to establish light-duty vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards. Citing numerous fatal flaws in EPA’s proposed rule, IER opposes the rule in its current form and asserts that EPA should not regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles under the Clean Air Act.
“By EPA’s own estimates, this proposed rule will only reduce global temperature at most by .018 of a degree by the year 2100. With such negligible climactic benefits — if any at all — it is hard to understand why the federal government would push new regulations that will effectively increase the cost of buying a car by thousands of dollars and push 7 million drivers out of the market,” noted IER President Tom Pyle.
“The whole stated point of this regulation is to reduce global warming, yet by EPA’s own projections it will have no meaningful impact on global temperature. This is a staggering display of costly bureaucratic waste.”
IER states numerous reasons for opposing the rule, which include:
- The lack of scientific meaningfulness in EPA’s regulation.
- The lack of a rational basis for apparently arbitrary standards.
- The potential that EPA has overstated the potential benefits of the proposed rule.
- The further indication that EPA’s Endangerment Finding rests on shaky ground.
- The dubious nature of EPA’s cost-benefit analysis.
- The erroneous assumption by EPA that American consumers are economically irrational.
- The draconian nature of EPA’s standards that do not account for consumer choice and varied preferences.
- The improper use of the “social cost of carbon” in EPA’s assessment to claim billions of dollars of benefits for a rule that will not have any meaningful impact on the climate.
