On April 29, 2018, Fitzgerald Glider Kits LLC hired me to prepare a straw man Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) for an EPA regulation that would repeal certain provisions of a 2016 EPA regulation that would have intentionally driven several companies (including FGK) out of business.
EPA’s 1,116 page RIA for its 2016 regulation includes no incremental analysis of the benefits and costs of these provisions. This omission violated both OMB guidance and EPA guidance, both of which require incremental analysis of key provisions. It is therefore impossible for a third-party to prepare a fully-informed RIA; only a strawman RIA is feasible.
Nonetheless, the strawman RIA shows that the glider provisions in the 2016 EPA regulation may result in greater greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions. That’s because if gliders are driven off the market as EPA intended in 2016, truck buyers no longer able to buy them are likely to purchase used trucks or retain existing old trucks in service. Used and existing old trucks emit more greenhouse gases and pollutants than gliders. It’s not known how many would purchase new trucks instead of gliders, but because new trucks are 40% more expensive, that fraction is likely to be small.
Meanwhile, the adverse economic effects of the glider provisions in the 2016 EPA regulation are clear — hundreds of millions of dollars in forced early retirement of capital and thousands of American jobs lost. In its RIA, EPA did not acknowledge either of these predictable effects.
This strawman RIA should be sufficient to justify repealing the glider provisions. EPA has separate authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate rebuilt heavy-duty truck engines if it wants to treat all rebuilt engines fairly instead of discriminating against gliders.
The strawman RIA is #2 on my publications list and is directly accessible here.
EPA’s 1,116 page RIA for its 2016 regulation includes no incremental analysis of the benefits and costs of these provisions. This omission violated both OMB guidance and EPA guidance, both of which require incremental analysis of key provisions. It is therefore impossible for a third-party to prepare a fully-informed RIA; only a strawman RIA is feasible.
Nonetheless, the strawman RIA shows that the glider provisions in the 2016 EPA regulation may result in greater greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions. That’s because if gliders are driven off the market as EPA intended in 2016, truck buyers no longer able to buy them are likely to purchase used trucks or retain existing old trucks in service. Used and existing old trucks emit more greenhouse gases and pollutants than gliders. It’s not known how many would purchase new trucks instead of gliders, but because new trucks are 40% more expensive, that fraction is likely to be small.
Meanwhile, the adverse economic effects of the glider provisions in the 2016 EPA regulation are clear — hundreds of millions of dollars in forced early retirement of capital and thousands of American jobs lost. In its RIA, EPA did not acknowledge either of these predictable effects.
This strawman RIA should be sufficient to justify repealing the glider provisions. EPA has separate authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate rebuilt heavy-duty truck engines if it wants to treat all rebuilt engines fairly instead of discriminating against gliders.
The strawman RIA is #2 on my publications list and is directly accessible here.
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