Dear NRDC Activist,

President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set stronger standards to make new cars run cleaner, and those standards are beginning to go into effect. But the Trump administration just moved to delay those standards until 2029, buying itself time to ultimately gut the standards.

More soot. More smog. More asthma attacks. Two years is too long for our health. Transportation is one of the biggest sources of air pollution in the United States — and car manufacturers need to do their part to make our air cleaner.

WHAT'S HAPPENING
Trump’s EPA is seeking to delay critical new limits to reduce nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, and other pollutants that spew out of tailpipes.

Why? The Trump administration claims it is because sales of electric vehicles (EV), which have zero emissions, have slowed down, thus making it harder for automakers to comply because EVs count towards their overall compliance obligations. But that slowdown is the administration's own doing. They killed EV tax credits, rolled back clean car rules, and moved to block state standards — then pointed to slower EV sales as the reason to let gas-powered cars pollute more.

And what’s more, automakers don't need EVs to comply. They just need the EPA to stop giving them a free pass to keep polluting. There is no reason to delay, considering:

• The technology to build cleaner gas-powered cars that comply with the Biden EPA standards has existed for years
• That technology costs less than one percent of a vehicle’s price
• Automakers have had plenty of time to comply with these standards, which have been on the books for years

Submit a public comment opposing the EPA’s cynical plan to lock us into a cycle of dirty air by delaying critical emissions standards for cars and trucks.

WHAT'S AT STAKE
Every gas and diesel car and truck on the road pumps out a mix of pollutants — soot, smog-forming gases, toxic chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. Breathing it causes premature deaths, heart attacks, strokes, and asthma attacks. And it hits hardest for the millions of people who live and work near busy roads.

Over the life of these standards, the EPA's own modeling shows they'd prevent millions of tons of pollution — blocking millions of asthma attacks, thousands of hospitalizations, and hundreds of premature deaths. And they'd matter most in the communities that bear the heaviest burden: the neighborhoods along major highways and transportation corridors, which are disproportionately low-income communities and communities of color.

Delaying clean cars standards means more polluted air in the communities breathing the most of it. Submit a public comment before July 6 to help us fight back.

WHY IT MATTERS
Here's the part that should make your blood boil. In the same proposal, the EPA carefully calculated the savings for the auto industry: roughly $1.77 billion. But when it came to calculating the costs to human health from the added soot and smog, the asthma attacks, the hospital visits, and the premature deaths, it simply declined to do the math. No air quality modeling. No estimate of the health toll. Just a vague note that, sure, pollution will go up.

The EPA is supposed to protect the environment (it’s in the name!), but it chose otherwise. The agency’s own scientists have spent decades documenting how this exact pollution harms people; yet the EPA put a dollar figure on industry's convenience and left the human cost blank on purpose. That's not protecting the public. That's protecting polluters.

Tell the EPA to implement pollution standards that protect our health and environment — not industry profits.

WHAT NRDC IS DOING
NRDC is fighting this delay on every front. Our attorneys and policy experts are preparing detailed comments dismantling the EPA's legal and scientific justifications for the record. We're mobilizing tens of thousands of people like you to flood the docket with opposition. And if the EPA finalizes this giveaway anyway, we're prepared to challenge it in court. But the public record matters, and that's where you come in.

This is not the Trump administration’s first move against clean cars. Last year, the EPA moved to reverse the endangerment finding — the legal requirement for the government to protect people from climate-busting pollutants that endanger our health like carbon dioxide and methane — and proposed scrapping standards that limit climate pollution from cars and trucks along with it.

NRDC members fired back with over 56,000 public comments. When we sued the administration in February over this rollback, those comments helped build our case.

Now we need you to mobilize again — this time for cleaner air. Please submit your public comment now.

Sincerely,

Atid Kimelman
Attorney, Climate and Energy, NRDC