First they came for coal plants, then natural gas drilling and now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to make it illegal for people to convert your car into a racecar — all in the name of fighting global warming, of course.
Last year, EPA proposed new global warming regulations for vehicle emissions that effectively ban converting vehicles made for on-road use into racecars. The EPA will also make it illegal to buy or sell certain car parts used in racecar conversion.
“This proposed regulation represents overreaching by the agency, runs contrary to the law and defies decades of racing activity where EPA has acknowledged and allowed conversion of vehicles,” Chris Kersting, the president of the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), said in a statement.
SEMA specifically asked the EPA if its global warming rules would ban racecar conversions, and the agency confirmed this to be true. The news has racing hobbyists livid.
“Congress did not intend the original Clean Air Act to extend to vehicles modified for racing and has re-enforced that intent on more than one occasion,” Kersting said.
For years, President Barack Obama has pushed more regulations related to fuel economy and carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles as part of his effort to fight global warming. Obama’s latest round of vehicle regulations, proposed in October, sets standards for medium- and heavy-duty engines.
“By the middle of the next decade, the cars and trucks we buy will go twice as far on a gallon of gas,” Obama said in a 2013 speech. “That means you’ll have to fill up half as often; we’ll all reduce carbon pollution.”
But Obama’s vehicle regulations are projected to have an almost immeasurable impact on future global warming — based on the very same climate models used by the government to estimate the efficacy of CO2 regulations.
“In other words, EPA’s own analysis concedes that the model noise is greater than the model signal. This is indisputable proof that the impacts are statistically insignificant,” climate scientists Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger with the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in regulatory comments to the EPA last year.
“Further, if the model noise represents real world noise, then this is also indisputable proof that the “affect” will be undetectable and thus unverifiable,” Michaels and Knappenberger wrote. “And further still, no one could argue that averting 0.003°C of a projected 3.48°C of global warming… would have any ecologically significant impacts in the real world.”
Furthermore, low gas prices have frustrated Obama’s fuel efficiency ambitions. A study by University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute found that fuel economy of new cars sold in 2015 was lower in 2014. This is all due to cheap gasoline.
“When gasoline is cheap, the motivation just isn’t there for consumers to pay a whole lot of attention to fuel economy,” Brandon Schoettle, a UM researcher, told NPR.
The EPA did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Update: So, apparently this issue is much more complicated than SEMA has made it out to be. Here’s an article that explains the whole controversy: http://jalopnik.com/the-epas-crackdown-on-race-cars-explained-1758111546
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