The Wall Street Journal has a long look at how auto emissions regulations in the U.S. are changing for the worse under the Trump administration, and I encourage you to read it. A lot of it is what you’d expect given the deliberate chaos in the White House, but a passage about California and GM actually made me laugh.
You might remember that over the summer Honda, Ford, Volkswagen, and BMW struck a deal with the state of California to adhere to stricter admissions standards than what is expected to be finalized from the Trump administration in the coming weeks. Ford was the first of those automakers to sign on to the deal but Honda, Volkswagen, and BMW followed, reasoning that stricter emissions regulations were already happening overseas and it didn’t make much business sense to not stay on that course.
Other, unnamed automakers were also involved in the talks to possibly also negotiate a deal with California, but maybe you can guess the one automaker which was emphatically not.
Per The WSJ:
Other car companies were approached, but GM was purposely left out. The group worried the company was meeting with the administration and would try to derail their effort, [Mary Nichols, chair of the California Air Resources Board] said.
Now, snitching is a strong word here, but the WSJ is specifically highlighting GM being in communication with the Trump admin.
Ultimately, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Mazda, Nissan, Kia, and granola-chomping Subaru all sided with the Trump administration on emissions rules, and you can bet some or all of them were approached to negotiate with California. Not GM, though, apparently too incompetent to be trusted, or too self-defeating to be trusted, or just too compromised. It all made GM a possible snitch, the state of California and some of its peers concluded.
I mean, I guess snitching is only one of a myriad of possible ways that California and co imagined GM would fuck shit up. It’s also hard to imagine GM being completely out of the loop here, that nobody in the Ren Cen heard that California’s negotiations were happening without them, but then again, maybe it’s not that hard. I don’t know why this doesn’t surprise me.
Anyway! Go read the whole story here.
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