Forget the urbanist mantra "electric cars alone won't save us." The Trump administration is now seeking to make internal combustion cars more polluting and deadly than ever before — starting by denying that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human life at all. And it will take a massive, city-by-city effort from the livable streets movement to offset the damage.
On Tuesday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that his agency would seek to rescind the federal rule that directs regulators to treat greenhouse gases as a threat to public health, undoing the fundamental justification for swaths of environmental laws aimed at curbing emissions.
That rule, known colloquially as the "endangerment finding," has been particularly critical to setting tougher federal tailpipe standards on cars and trucks since it was first introduced in 2009. According to the EPA itself, new passenger cars emit 24 percent less today than they did in 2011, when the first cars became subject to those new emissions caps. Those gains, though, have been offset by increases in driving overall.
At a press event held at a truck dealership during a 107-degree heat advisory that itself was attributed to climate change, Zeldin made it clear that allowing cars to pollute more was the primary driving force behind scrapping the bedrock law.
"[The 2009 endangerment finding] been used to justify over $1 trillion in regulations," the agency wrote in a release, adding that scrapping regulators' ability to rein in climate-altering gases would reinstate "consumer choice" and give Americans "the ability to purchase a safe and affordable car for their family while decreasing the cost of living on all products that trucks deliver."
Sustainable transportation advocates, meanwhile, suspected the move had more to do with $445 million that Trump and Republicans in Congress raked in from the oil industry during the last elections, and less to do with saving Americans money — especially since the Energy Department's own numbers show that the repeal will sharply increase gas prices.
"The EPA is supposed to be working for the people, and not the polluters," said Kathy Harris of the National Resources Defense Council. "We see this as a blatant giveaway to the oil industry."
Of course, it won't surprise sustainable transportation advocates that automobility is the tip of the spear of the Trump administration's shift away from simply downplaying climate change and towards outright climate denial — which, to be clear, is based on misinformation and "cherrypick[ed] data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not," as climate scientist Zeke Hausfather recently said in an explainer for E&E news.
Advocates of affordable transportation, meanwhile, probably won't be surprised that Zeldin resurrected the long-debunked myth that the cost of research and development needed to meet strong tailpipe standards are passed onto overburdened consumers. In reality, of course, today's high auto prices are mostly traceable to a combination of inflation and the rising prevalence of large, luxury pick-ups and SUVs — and what's actually driving American families towards poverty is near-compulsory car ownership.
People who aren't steeped in the fight for a less car-dependent America, though, might be startled to realize just how thoroughly a single rule change could threaten the human species' prospects for fighting climate change, not to mention individuals' ability to simply afford to live on that rapidly warming planet — or how ill-equipped the nation is to fight back against without embracing a radically new set of multimodal solutions that aren't so vulnerable to the stroke of a federal pen.
Let's get a few basic facts out there:
The U.S. transportation sector isn't just a drag on the planet's urgent decarbonization goals: it's an emitter so massive that, "if it were its own country, [it] would be the fourth largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world," the New York Times reported.
It's important to note, though, that the overwhelming majority of those "transport" emissions are really just auto emissions, which come directly from the tailpipes of SUVs, pick-ups, vans, trucks, and cars, roughly in that descending order.
That's in part because the vast majority of America has no choice but to get behind the wheel for the vast majority of their trips — and few options besides SUVs when they go to the dealership to buy a vehicle. Transit, biking, and walking infrastructure have been so drastically defunded in our country — and constant driving so systematically encouraged, subsidized, and even functionally required by law — that U.S. residents today take 87 percent of their trips in personal cars, compared to 73 percent in Europe, with some individual countries clocking in far lower.
And all that motoring comes at a price. The majority of U.S. drivers are currently spending more than 15 percent of their income just on automotive costs — a threshold which most personal finance experts consider cost-burdened — with Black households disproportionately spending above that limit.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that if current driving trends continue, U.S. households would lose an estimated $5.9 trillion collectively between 2035 to 2050, compared to what they'd gain if they could cut their vehicle miles traveled by just 27 percent. The avoidable costs to public health from pollution and traffic violence over that period would be north of $128 billion, too, plus the priceless loss of tens of thousands of human lives every year.
Study after study after study, meanwhile, has shown that even the most aggressive efforts to increase electric car adoption will not be enough on their own to sufficiently decarbonize the transport sector, without efforts to decrease driving overall. And vehicle electrification also wouldn't touch the intertwined traffic violence and affordability crises that are ravaging U.S. communities because of mass car usage.
For years, transportation reform advocates have begged policymakers and the environmental groups who lobby them to make mode shift a bigger part of their climate strategy, alongside investments in vehicle electrification for communities that can't easily transition away from car dependency.
To state the blazingly obvious, though, it is no longer enough to beat the drum of "EVs are not enough."
We are now governed by a White House that is not just downplaying the harms of fossil fuels, but openly seeking to "unleash American energy" and maximize the amount of oil we burn every day of our lives.
We have a DOT secretary and an EPA administrator who are both open climate change deniers, and who have each, in the last week alone, referred to the need to curb fossil fuels as "climate religion," rather than the overwhelming consensus of every credible member of the international scientific community.
It was one thing to point out the shortcomings of an electric-vehicle-led decarbonization strategy when President Joe Biden was pumping billions into tax credits and chargers for EVs, and offering significantly less for transit, biking, and walking projects.
It's another thing altogether when the President Donald Trump has spent years smearing those EV programs as tantamount to an authoritarian "electric vehicle mandate" — despite the fact that only one percent of cars on the road today run on batteries alone — and successfully gotten Congress to rescind the former while illegally freezing the latter.
Of course, there are limits to how much the Trump administration can dirty America's vehicle fleet.
Harris of the NRDC points out that the global marketplace is still demanding zero-emission vehicles, and automakers are global companies; while the U.S. certainly won't help support the electrification revolution, it can't single-handedly grind it to a halt.
And undoubtedly, many U.S. consumers will still buy EVs, whether because their state offers still them a rebate even after the federal one vanishes on September 30th, because they recognize that EVs will still save them money even without a subsidy, or because they personally want to emit less, whether or not the White House believes emissions are harmful.
Still, this moment should be a sobering reminder that putting too many of our chips on autocentric, federal solutions to decarbonize the transportation sector can too easily prove a losing bet — not least because those chips can easily get swept off the table when oil-soaked politicians take office. And our best hope may be to throw our energy into state, local, and hyper-local strategies to increase biking, walking, and transit — not just without much federal help, but often, in the face of open federal opposition.
Every statewide transit referendum we can pass, every bike lane we can build, and every bus stop we can simply outfit with a bench in our neighborhoods will matter now more than ever. Every trip we individually choose to take that doesn't burn an ounce of fossil fuels can be an act of resistance.
And while losing the endangerment finding likely means we won't be able to give up on EVs anytime soon, we badly need state and local leaders to step up and fight for multimodal strategies in the meantime.
"We obviously still need to continue to support our transit opportunities and making sure that people do not ned to drive a car, [because they] have those other options," Harris added. "[We need to] make sure that that transit is clean and zero emissions as well. But I do think we still need to also work on tackling that largest portion of the sector that's on our roads right now."
For information on how to leave a comment about the proposed rescission of the endangerment finding, click here.
