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Sparks

Could Trump Scuttle the EPA’s New Car Rules?

Not no, but not yes, either.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The D.C. Armory is big enough to fit an F-150 Lightning, a hybrid Jeep Compass, and a Cadillac Lyriq, with room to spare for an elephant.

That elephant was in the room on Wednesday when Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi announced the Biden administration’s finalized vehicle emissions standards, flanked onstage by plugged-in models from GM, Ford, and Stellantis. That element is the invisible, though nevertheless looming possibility of a second Trump administration.

Though climate advocates and environmental groups have celebrated the EPA’s rules for pushing the country closer to its net zero goals (while also lamenting that the rules didn’t go as far as planned), threats have been mounting. Perhaps none is more concerning than Trump’s potential return to the White House with the Project 2025 playbook in hand. The Heritage Foundation-authored blueprint for a Republican president explicitly describes dismantling the EPA and singles out as a priority reviewing “the existing ‘ramp rate’ for car standards to ensure that it is actually achievable.”

When Trump last took office, he replaced, eliminated, or otherwise undid more than 100 environmental rules, including Obama-era vehicle emissions standards. When I spoke to environmental lawyers at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, though, they stressed that the EPA’s regulations make it difficult for an unfriendly executive branch to shake them off.

If a future administration were to want to change the rules finalized this week, it would have to go through “a full rulemaking process,” Peter Zalzal, a member of EDF’s Domestic Climate and Air legal team, told me. That would include “a proposal that laid out the agency’s rationale for making those choices, and the facts supporting that rationale, and then hold a public comment process to incorporate stakeholder feedback.” Only after going through all that would it be able to take decisive action.

While it is possible that a Trump administration would attempt this, a senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund, stressed that groups like theirs would fight tooth and nail to halt such a rollback. There are plenty of stages in the EPA rulemaking process where environmental groups could intervene, including by taking the administration to court.

Trouble might start even sooner than January, though. By Thursday morning, there were already multiple reports of Republican attorneys general who had “warned the EPA against rolling out more aggressive tailpipe emissions standards,” and opponents in Congress had filed a bipartisan resolution to undo the rule. There’s even a world in which a decision could be punted up to the Supreme Court, whose recent decisions have been hostile toward the EPA’s regulatory powers. Additionally, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers trade group is planning a seven-figure ad spend across seven states “against the new rules heading into the 2024 election,” Kelley Blue Book reports, including an effort to brand them as a “gas car ban.”

The rules are definitively not a ban, and automakers are generally on board with them. “It’s just not a case that these standards require any kind of particular technologies,” Zalzal, from EDF, told me. “In fact, we’ve done modeling to show that manufacturers could meet these by selling very few battery electric vehicles.” (He added that, to be clear, that isn’t the expectation). Generally, experts seem to agree that the rules are on solid legal footing.

Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has reported, California has quietly been working behind the scenes to get automakers to voluntarily comply with the regulations — and, in that way, sneakily “Trump-proof” the electrification push.

After all, that’s the one thing you can count on with elephants: You can see them coming.

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Sparks

After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
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The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

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“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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