So the Trump administration finally finished rolling back the pointlessly expensive and impossible-to-achieve 2012 Obama administration fuel economy standards. Great. But did EPA staff sabotage the rulemaking to favor certain legal challenge by environmentalists? You betcha.

The pending Federal Register notice for the final rollback is here.

On page 1590, the EPA staff claims that the rollback will result in 444 to 1,000 premature deaths from PM2.5 emissions over the life of the rule — i.e. until the year 2068.

On page 1190, the EPA explains that its claims about PM2.5 are based on the agency’s 2019 Integrated Scientific Assessment (ISA) for PM2.5:

But JunkScience.com readers know that in December of 2019, the EPA’s legally-required board of outside science advisors, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), completely trashed the EPA’s 2019 ISA as junk science.

So why did EPA staff so heavily rely on the 2019 ISA despite being spanked by CASAC?

Sabotage.

Environmental groups are going to sue over the rule. They will claim that the Trump administration issued a rule that will kill people. Worse, they will allege that the Trump administration knows that the rule will kill people. But the rule was issued anyway.

And you don’t have to believe me that this was sabotage. The New York Times has a whole article (Web | PDF) in today’s print edition about how EPA resistance staff is subtly sabotaging the Trump administration.

As succinctly expressed by me in the article:

I was on the media call today when the rulemaking was announced.The fake news media was asking EPA and DOT staff questions about the PM2.5 deaths. The best EPA staff could do was to refer to them in passing as “statistical deaths” and then that they would be offset by lives saved from lower car prices (which help people get out of old cars and into newer safe cars faster).

We will see how courts view this particular aspect of the coming legal battle between the liars (i.e., green groups) and ignorant (i.e., Justice Department lawyers).

Don’t be surprised to see lower court judges believe the liars and dismiss the more-than-offsetting claim about lives saved.