Trump admin delays greenhouse gas measurement rule for highways

The Trump administration is delaying enforcement of an Obama administration regulation that would have required state and local officials to measure greenhouse gas emissions related to the use of specific highways.

The greenhouse gas reporting requirement was part of a regulation establishing new performance measurement standards for federally funded highways that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) put into place days before former President Barack Obama left office.

Some of the performance measure regulation will take force, but the FHWA said in a Federal Register notice due for publication Friday that it would delay other parts for a year while officials decide whether they want to rescind or revise them.

{mosads}“The president’s appointees and designees need to further delay the effective date of the sections of the … final rule pertaining to the GHG measure to have adequate time to review them,” the FHWA wrote in the notice.

The FHWA plans to allow a new round of public comments on the greenhouse gas provision for potential revision.

The performance measure rule implements provisions of the 2012 and 2015 highway infrastructure bills.

The Obama administration argued that measuring greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles on federally funded highways would help the government to find out if federal dollars are going to environmentally sound causes.

But opponents of the regulation, like Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), said the 2012 and 2015 laws do not specifically authorize greenhouse gas requirements as part of the performance measures.