ALARMISTS GONNA ALARM: Some of the usual suspects used their perch in the Washington Post last week to allege that the administration’s new fuel economy rule (the SAFE rule) will lead to a post-apocalyptic hellscape. My colleague Marlo Lewis eviscerates this alarmist claptrap:

“Last month, deep in a 500-page draft environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century,” [the authors] breathlessly report.

Actually, there is nothing startling about that assumption. It’s the same old catastrophe narrative begat by mating overheated climate models…with an emission scenario known as RCP8.5 that bizarrely assumes coal displaces gas as the world’s dominant electricity fuel throughout the 21st century…

The EIS [Environmental Impact Statement] finds that replacing the Obama mileage standards with the SAFE rule’s standards would have vanishingly small impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures, and sea levels.

Specifically, under the SAFE rule, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would reach 789.76 parts per million in the year 2100 instead of 789.11 ppm—an 8/100th of a percent increase. That extra 0.65 part per million of carbon dioxide would increase global average annual temperature by 0.003°C and sea levels by 6 millimeters in 2100.

In fact, the new SAFE rule will save lives. Not that the Post would deign to let you know that. Read Marlo’s entire post.