The climate change lobby-funded lackeys at The Associated Press are ludicrously attempting to cast President Donald Trump’s deregulatory efforts to boost the economy as a crime against the environment.
AP reporters Alexa St. John and Anne D’Innocenzio’s new beef involves Trump’s relaxation of the disastrous Biden-era fuel economy standards that has hamstrung the auto industry for years.
“Trump administration lowers fuel economy standards, critics say at a significant environmental cost,” read their agitprop-heavy September 28 headline. The reporters railed against Trump for relaxing oh-so-virtuous regulations supposedly engineered to “control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks.”
But as then-Heritage Foundation Distinguished Fellow Steven Bradbury noted in 2024, the Biden administration was hellbent on “dictating” fuel standards that were “impossible for ICE vehicles to meet—something Congress never authorized.” The end goal, as Bradbury pointed out, was to “snuff out Americans’ love affair with the internal-combustion engine” and mainstream electric vehicle usage, something AP clearly champions:
The change furthers Trump’s promise to revoke policies that encouraged or created incentives for the production of electric vehicles and ultimately, will expose Americans to more planet-warming pollution from vehicles.
Here’s the fine-print St. John and D’Innocenzio chose to nix: EVs’ value depreciation rates are so ridiculously quick it's almost comical. Autoblog released a report the same day St. John and D’Innocenzio’s piece went live, and found that the steep price of battery replacement could drastically shorten the practical lifespan of electric vehicles.”
In short, per Autoblog, “When an aging commuter car experiences a major high-voltage fault, the total cost of parts and labor can easily outpace the depreciated value of the vehicle itself.” The upshot is that this debilitating cost dynamic “directly challenges the fundamental sustainability goals of going green,” which is precisely what the Biden administration’s insane Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards sought to force down consumers’ collective throat.
Did AP disclose any of that? Of course, not, as St. John and D’Innocenzio appeared more concerned with elevating how “[n]ews of the revised standards immediately drew rebukes from environmentalists,” as if car owners looking at the loaded stress on their checking accounts gave two hoots about what the greens think. The new finalized Trump standards would “correspond to a combined industry fleetwide average of roughly 34.9 miles per gallon for passenger cars and light trucks in the 2031 model year,” per St. John and D’Innocenzio. “That’s up from 30.1 miles per gallon for model year 2024, but down from a projected 50.4 miles per gallon in 2031 under rules put in place by the Biden administration.” Oh boo-hoo.
On another note, when energy prices are undergoing waves of sticker shocks amidst the ongoing conflict over the Strait of Hormuz, one would think relaxing auto production streamlining to offset them would be a net economic benefit. As St. John and D’Innocenzio reported, “Automakers and industry groups have said the new rules will increase Americans’ access to the full range of gasoline vehicles they need and can afford.”
But no, the AP duo chose to fixate on vacillating oil and gas prices — which are more a reflection of market jitters than fundamentals — as somehow necessitating stringent standards that force automakers to produce with both hands tied behind their backs:
‘Trump is tanking sensible mile per gallon standards at the worst possible time for consumers, who are getting hit with sky-high prices at the pump,’ the Center for Biological Diversity’s Becker said. ‘Consumers will pay the price for these reckless rollbacks while Trump’s Big Oil and Big Auto buddies reap the short-term profits.’
Ah, shaddap.
