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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.

A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
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On global emissions, Bill Gates on Chinese nuclear, and a geothermal breakthrough
Current conditions: Hurricane Melissa made landfall over Jamaica as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record before barreling north toward Cuba • A cold front will send temperatures plunging as far as 15 degrees below average across the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast • The Colombian Andes are bracing for flooding amid up to 8 inches of rain forecast for Wednesday.
 
The Trump administration’s all-of-government approach to thwarting construction of offshore wind turbines has included the Department of the Interior de-designating federal waters to turbine development and the Department of Transportation yanking funding, in addition to various steps taken by other agencies. Now the Department of Health and Human Services is taking its swing at the industry. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to open an investigation into the potential harms offshore wind farms pose. In late summer, the agency instructed the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to prepare research about wind farms’ impact on fishing businesses. The effort included Kennedy personally meeting with NIOSH director Josh Howard, in the course of which he gave Howard — a career physician and lawyer who previously oversaw federal efforts on September 11 victims’ health — specific experts to contact, according to the newswire report. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has also been involved in the initiative.
It’s part of what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman called “Trump’s total war on wind,” an assault that started on President Donald Trump’s first day back in office. Earlier this month, oil major Shell’s top executive in the United States warned that the precedents the administration was setting risked being weaponized against fossil fuel companies once Trump exited power.
In the first real decline ever forecast by the United Nations, global emissions are now expected to fall by 10% below 1990 levels by 2035, according to a report issued Tuesday. But the world remains far off from the 60% reduction goal scientists say is necessary to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the target leaders committed to when they signed the Paris Agreement a decade ago. “Humanity is now clearly bending the emissions curve downwards for the first time, although still not nearly fast enough,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “We have a serious need for more speed.”
The latest assessment comes as the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris climate negotiations and other countries are paring back spending on decarbonization ahead of the UN climate talks in Belem, Brazil, next month.
On Tuesday, Bill Gates released a provocative new treatise on climate change in which he laid out what he sees as necessary ahead of November’s climate summit. Before that, on Friday afternoon, the billionaire philanthropist gathered with half a dozen journalists in a conference room in Manhattan to discuss his latest ideas over lunch. Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer, who was in attendance, has a good breakdown of some of what Gates discussed. I also attended the lunch and wanted to highlight another point Gates made: The West is losing the race for new nuclear power. When it comes to fission, China is building more reactors than anyone else, and helped perfect the Westinghouse AP1000 before its successful construction in the U.S. Gates’ own reactor developer, TerraPower, had plans to build its debut plant in China prior to the souring in relations between Washington and Beijing nearly a decade ago. When it comes to fusion, he said, there’s no topping how much funding China has directed toward the technology.
“The amount of money they’re putting into fusion is more than the rest of the world put together, times two,” Gates told us. “There is a substantial amount of Chinese capital going into that, and in fission, they built the most reactors.”
Chemical giant Honeywell has announced a new technology that converts agricultural and forestry waste into ready-to-use renewable fuels that can directly replace the carbon-intensive fuel used by large ships and airplanes. The so-called “Biocrude Upgrading” processing hardware can be provided in modular form and equipped to ships at a moment when global regulators are seeking to slash the roughly 3% of planet-heating emissions that come from cargo vessels. “The maritime industry has a real need for renewable fuels that are immediately available and cost effective,” Ken West, Honeywell’s energy and sustainability solutions president, said in a statement. The news comes nearly two weeks after Trump “torpedoed” — as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham put it — efforts at the International Maritime Organization to slash emissions from regulated ships.
The geothermal startup Eavor said Tuesday that its breakthroughs in drilling had slashed the time it takes to drill its wells underground. The Canadian company said that the results of two years of drilling at its flagship project in Geretsried, Germany, showed its efforts to dig to hotter and deeper locations are working. “Much like wind and solar have come down the cost curve, much like unconventional shale [oil and gas] have come down the cost curve, we now have a technical proof-point that we’ve done that in Europe,” Jeanine Vany, a cofounder and executive vice president of corporate affairs at Eavor, told Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci.
The breakup of the ancient supercontinent 1.5 billion years ago transformed the Earth’s surface environments and laid the groundwork for the emergence of complex life. That’s according to new research by Australian scientists at the University of Sydney and the University of Adelaide. The findings challenge what has long been called the “boring billion,” a time when biological and geological changes effectively stalled. The plate tectonics that reshaped the planet triggered conditions that supported oxygen-rich oceans and fostered the appearance of the first eukaryotes, the ancestors of all complex life. “Our work reveals that deep Earth processes, specifically the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Nuna, set off a chain of events that reduced volcanic carbon dioxide emissions and expanded the shallow marine habitats where early eukaryotes evolved,” Dietmar Müller, a University of Sydney professor and the study’s lead author, said in a press release.
Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the nuclear construction boom is real, and what lessons nuclear companies should take from economic history.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Is there a nuclear bubble? … As people who are interested in long-term decarbonization, number one, this is quite reminiscent of the environment that hit clean energy companies right as Biden was taking office. And number two, is there a nuclear bubble, and what does this mean for how we should think about nuclear going forward? Because at the end of this, I think the only way that any of this helps the climate is if we build a lot more plants.
Skanda Amarnath: We are definitely in a moment when there’s a lot of froth. I don’t want to say everything — it’s always like, it’ll feel unfair and not accurate to go after every single proposition that’s in markets. Like for example, Rick Perry’s Fermi America, they did an IPO and raised a lot of capital pretty successfully. And they have a plan for how they want to build a lot of stuff out — gas, solar, batteries. They want to build four AP1000s, the large, light-water reactors that are seen as the most recent that we’ve built in the United States, and they think they could do them at the same speed that China builds those same reactors.
On the surface of it, there are parts of it that seem interesting and promising. On the other hand, there’s also parts of it that feel very much wrapped up in the speculative frenzy. It gets more exaggerated when you get to like examples like Oklo. They seem to be very politically connected, specifically to Chris Wright. That plus some very small milestone successes in the fuel supply chain are now being sort of magnified into, They’re going be very successful in building out there first of a kind technology. And even in the space of small modular reactors, what they’re offering seems at least substantially more risky than what may be — outside of the space, so even compared to GE’s proposition for a small boiling water reactor, the technology that’s involved with like Oklo is kind of out there.
And one of the things, the lessons of nuclear, if you look through the history, is the more new stuff you’re doing, the harder it is, the more likely it is that you will get heartburn in terms of cost, in terms of schedule, and you never want to do this again. And it’ll involve a lot of bankruptcy, as it did with the case of the Georgia reactors that were built in the last decade. And so this is a sign that there’s clearly a lot of hype and a lot of willingness to take risk, and it’s not really backed up by fundamentals. That can be sometimes overrated in a boom. But that is something that people will look to in a bust and say, what were we doing here? Why was the price of the stock so high?
Mentioned:
How Electricity Got So Expensive
New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About Electricity Prices, by Matt Zeitlin for Heatmap
Previously on Shift Key: The Last Computing-Driven Electricity Demand Boom That Wasn’t
Meta lays off 600 workers
Amazon lays off 14,000 workers
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017 The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”