The automakers aren’t asking for the old standards, to be clear: They want looser rules and more generous accounting. Nor are they rejecting the proposal, exactly. They have not taken on the stern language of a coalition of consumer advocates, environmental groups, and public-health nonprofits who have denounced the new rules. Automakers did not mention, for instance, that the new rules could emit as much greenhouse gas as is released today by the 70 smallest countries on Earth.

But automakers do want the national miles-per-gallon requirement to increase every year. In this, they may seem to be striking a sensible, savvy middle-ground position: neither this, nor that.

But we’re only here—and the U.S. is only rolling back the rules—because of the Auto Alliance’s concerted lobbying. For more than a year after Trump’s inauguration, the Alliance publicly bludgeoned the fuel-economy standards, beseeching the administration to withdraw them. Now, it’s gotten what it said it wanted—and it isn’t sure it likes it.

How did it get in this mess? It starts in January 2017, a week before Trump took office. That’s when the Environmental Protection Agency announced its long-standing fuel-economy rules would stay in place through 2025. Though the agency had first issued the rules in 2012, and had spent years preparing to affirm them, Obama officials rushed the schedule to publish them before Trump’s inauguration.

Automakers felt cheated. The next month, they sent a letter to the Trump administration. It warned that the standards “threaten to depress an industry” and said the EPA “should withdraw” them. They followed it up with months of in-person charm. During the spring and summer of 2017, auto executives met regularly with Scott Pruitt, the then-EPA administrator. A Toyota vice president drove Pruitt around in a $100,000 Lexus. (The jaunt was not revealed to the public at the time.)

As 2018 arrived, the Auto Alliance even pushed junk science, questioning in a legal document whether tailpipe pollution causes early deaths. (Decades of research has found that it does.) The Alliance also quoted legitimate studies out of context, implying that climate scientists “tune” their models to arrive at certain outcomes and that global warming does not exacerbate drought or hurricanes.

Then, right around March of this year, automakers tapped the brakes. Perhaps officials in the Department of Transportation—which writes the fuel-economy rules with the EPA—signaled by that point that they wanted not just to loosen the rules, but to freeze them altogether. In any case, individual automakers began to dissent. Ford, whose executives have made climate change central to the company’s public image, suddenly took the time to speak up.

“The cost of believing [climate change] is not real is just too high,” wrote Bill Ford, the company’s chairman, in a Medium post at the end of that month. “We support increasing clean-car standards through 2025 and are not asking for a rollback.” (Ford’s nuts-and-bolts record on climate change is mixed. The company has stopped selling its most fuel-efficient cars—its sedans and hatchbacks—in the United States, but it is also investing $11 billion in new hybrid and electric vehicles.)