{beacon} Energy & Environment Energy & Environment The Big Story Trump rolls back car fuel efficiency rules The Trump administration has rolled back car fuel efficiency standards requiring automakers to ensure their cars and light trucks were using less fuel. © AP Photo/Rick Bowmer While the Biden-era standards would have been expected…
Page F2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 29 September 2026
Coal asked for a rescue, automakers for looser mileage rules; the administration obliged both in a week.
As it ran on the front
You will want to know what a rescue costs. Nothing, as it happens — nothing to the party that asked for one. A top lobbyist wrote a letter, previously unreported, floating emergency powers to keep aging coal plants open, and the administration obliged. Obliged, mind you, not compelled. Emergency is the handsome word: it converts a plant that cannot hold its own into a thing the country may not lose.
The automakers asked too — for looser mileage rules — and on Monday the fuel economy standards were sharply scaled back. Two requests, two dispensations, the same week.…
…(cont) You are thinking something was broken. Nothing was. These are powers the statutes hand out, exercised as drafted, at the request of the people they were drafted for ... that is all of it.
Who paid? The standards required cars and light trucks to use less fuel. They do not require it now. You buy the fuel.
At dusk the farmer unlatched the hen house. The fox walked in.
“A top lobbyist writes a letter floating emergency powers for aging coal plants, and look at that, the emergency turns up. Same week, the automakers get the mileage rules loosened — the rules that made your car go farther on a gallon. Nobody had to break a thing. They asked, they got, and you fill the tank.”
“These are two entirely separate agency actions and frankly, hearing from industry is how you avoid regulating blind. Did I say industry? Stakeholders. That doesn't sound like me. And a letter is a letter — the Times printed it, so where exactly is the scandal, the part where somebody wrote something down?”
The receipts
While running for president in 2024, Donald Trump told oil and gas executives that he would pursue their policy priorities if the industry raised $1 billion for his campaign—and after returning to office last year, the Republican did just that, enriching those invested in fossil fuels, including himself, at the expense of the public and…
In a previously unreported letter, a top lobbyist floated the idea of using emergency powers to keep aging coal plants open.
Also, Republicans plan a major ad blitz. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.
· Federal Appellate Court Kills Trump Bid to Keep 'Old, Expensive, and Dirty' Coal Plant Open from the morgue, 11 Sep 2026
· 'Actively Malevolent': Trump EPA to Eviscerate Rules on Planet-Heating Pollution From Power Plants from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.