On Saturday, President Trump announced that he had approved new vehicle fuel economy standards, and on Monday the Transportation Department made the final rule official. Within hours, the legacy media covered the rollback of Biden’s vehicle mandates with shrill criticisms. The New York Times told readers that the administration was gutting a signature federal effort to speed the shift to electric vehicles. Politico judged the revision “one more nail in the coffin” for Biden-era EV policy. Bloomberg’s headline announced that the US “guts” auto mileage rules, while the Washington Post ran its own story under the banner “Analysts are doubtful”, reporting that “experts” scoffed at the administration’s claim of a $1,300 cut in new-car prices.
The final rule requires a fleetwide average of 34.9 miles per gallon by model year 2031, in place of the roughly 50 mpg demanded by Biden’s standards. To the assembled commentariat, this is climate vandalism, a betrayal of drivers and a gift to Beijing. Every one of these claims is false or badly misleading. And the missing context – what the Biden mandates cost, who paid, and what they actually bought – is the story the legacy press coverage never reveals.
A funeral for a rule already dead
Start with an irony that the NYT buries in its own reporting. The paper conceded that Congress had already scrapped the fines for automakers that miss the mileage targets, leaving Monday’s rollback more symbolic than substantive. That penalty repeal, part of last year’s One
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Regulation is the tool of low ability political management. They can’t fix any real problems so they impinge on peoples lives and choices to create an illusion of being in some way effective.
Another clear informative article. The reduction in actual pollutants since the 1970s is striking. Not that the soap dodging Greens loons will recognise, or acknowledge, that.
Nominally. But not really. It’ was about socialists wanting to impose central planning on us.
Socialists don’t think central planning is an unfortunate but necessary tool to solve problems. They think central planning is the right way and that markets are fundamentally flawed and cannot be relied on to allocate resources properly.
It’s a far bigger ideological issue. CO2 is just one of their many excuses to impose the economic system of their choice.