Automakers were eager from the minute the Trump regime took the reins at the White House in 2017 to weaken new vehicle emissions rules established by the Obama administration. While they wanted what they called “sensible” changes, what they got instead was much more than they asked for. In fact, the emissions rollback the Environmental Protection Agency announced in April 2018 worried the vehicle manufacturers because they knew it could generate big legal battles.
The new emissions rule, negotiated in President Obama’s first term with automakers and environmental advocates, called for doubling fuel efficiency for passenger vehicles to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The automakers sought more flexibility in meeting the standard by that deadline. Instead, the EPA plan, if implemented, would freeze standards at the 2020 levels. For the automakers, the problem with that draconian move is that California—with 14 million cars and light trucks on the road—has long led the nation in setting higher standards for auto emissions and zero-emission vehicles. Litigation around the Trump plan might, they knew, split the U.S. auto market, something they most definitely do not want.
But when the rollback was announced, there was glee at Marathon Oil, the gas and petroleum enterprise that earned $4.4 billion in 2017.
As Hiroko Tabuchi explains in great detail in The New York Times Thursday, Marathon, working with petrochemical giant Koch Industries and an advocacy group called AFPM that includes Exxon, Chevron, and Phillips 66 on its board, ran a “stealth campaign” to maximize the rollback. Bottom line: more efficient cars means less gasoline sales, and that mean less profit for Marathon and other oil companies. Tabuchi notes that last week on an investor call, Gary R. Heminger, Marathon’s chairman and chief executive, said the rollback would mean industry sales of as much as an additional 400,000 gallons of gasoline every day.