By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, May 14 (Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed a delay in enforcement of a regulation requiring significant cuts in air pollution from vehicles.
The EPA estimated that delaying former President Joe Biden’s anti-pollution rule would save automakers $1.7 billion. Environmental groups criticized the delay, saying it would lead to an increase in preventable illness and premature deaths.
The EPA said the proposal, first reported by Reuters earlier Thursday, would delay compliance deadlines for light- and medium-duty vehicles for two years until the 2029 model year. It cited the decline in U.S. sales of electric vehicles, which it said made the more stringent pollution rules unattainable for manufacturers.
In April 2024, Biden’s EPA finalized a rule requiring significant reductions in so-called “criteria pollutants” emitted from passenger and commercial vehicles from the 2027 through 2032 model years.
The Sierra Club criticized the move to delay enforcement of more stringent limits on pollutants from gasoline-powered vehicles. The group said the reductions are “readily achievable using commonsense, low-cost technologies already used by many vehicles.”
The Sierra Club added that EPA’s analysis “shows that delaying the standards would sharply increase harmful pollution, preventable illness, and premature deaths.”
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen , Ford, Stellantis, Hyundai and others, said the EPA proposal “makes a lot of sense given current market conditions.”
The group’s CEO John Bozzella said the Biden emission standards were “unachievable absent significant growth in electric vehicle sales” and would make gasoline-powered vehicles more expensive.
The Biden rules require a 50% reduction through 2032 for light vehicles and a 58% cut for medium-duty vehicles in the six so-called “criteria pollutants”: ozone, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and lead.
In 2024, EPA estimated $13 billion in annualized benefits due to reduced emissions of criteria pollutants that contribute to the formation of soot and smog.
The Trump administration has taken a series of steps to roll back vehicle regulations. In February, it finalized its repeal of the “endangerment finding” for vehicles, a 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, which gave EPA authority to regulate emissions from vehicles.
In December, the Transportation Department proposed significantly reducing the fuel economy requirements from model years 2022 to 2031, requiring 34.5 miles per gallon on average by 2031, down from 50.4 miles per gallon.
This year, Trump signed legislation that ended fuel economy penalties for automakers, and USDOT said they faced no fines dating back to the 2022 model year.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Nia Williams and David Gregorio)
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