Beyond Any One Government’s Term: What the Church Asks of a Fuel Rule Written for 2031

On Monday, the Transportation Department cut the projected 2031 fleet average for new cars and light trucks from 50.4 miles per gallon to 34.9, and named the rule Freedom Means Affordable Cars. The same day, AAA put the national average for gasoline at $4.47 a gallon. Cars sold under this rule will still be on the road in the 2040s, so the Church’s teaching on creation asks a question most of Monday’s coverage skipped: whom is a rule like this written for, and how long does it have to hold?

The News Story

The U.S. Department of Transportation on Monday, September 28, released a final rule that lowers the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for new passenger cars and light trucks, reversing the stricter requirements the Biden administration adopted in 2024. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which runs the program, estimates the new standards will produce a fleetwide average of about 34.9 miles per gallon by model year 2031. The 2024 rule had projected 50.4 miles per gallon for the same year. The fleet average for model year 2024 was about 30.1 miles per gallon.¹

The department named the 892-page rule “Freedom Means Affordable Cars.” It covers model years 2022 through 2031, but vehicles through model year 2026 are already on the market, and some 2027 models are in production, so Roll Call reports the practical effect will fall mostly on vehicles from 2028 onward. The rule ends a credit-trading program, due to start with model year 2028, under which makers of electric vehicles could sell compliance credits to companies that fell short. Beginning in model year 2030, it also reclassifies many small crossovers as passenger cars rather than light trucks. The department projects that the new-vehicle mix, now roughly 70% light trucks, will flip to roughly 70% cars.²

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the administration had “finally ended the illegal mandate that forced automakers to produce more expensive electric vehicles that American families didn’t want.” The department says the rule will cut the average price of a new vehicle by $1,300 and save consumers $138 billion over 5 years. President Trump previewed the rule on Truth Social on Saturday, writing that it would “take the waste out of building cars in America.”³

The 2024 standards let manufacturers meet the targets with any technology and contained no requirement to sell electric vehicles, ABC News and the Associated Press reported. The administration and automakers argue the targets were high enough that meeting them would have required a large shift toward electric vehicles. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the trade group for most major automakers, called the new rule “an appropriate course correction.” Ford, General Motors and Stellantis issued statements supporting it.⁴

Environmental groups condemned the rule. The Environmental Defense Fund estimated it will cost the average driver about $1,400 more in fuel, and the Sierra Club said it would fight the change. In 2024, NHTSA estimated the Biden-era standards would save 14 billion gallons of gasoline by 2050, with lifetime fuel savings outweighing higher sticker prices. The department now says the new rule will still cut yearly oil consumption in 2050 by about 1.3 billion barrels compared with 2024. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said lower standards would mean “handing the clean tech future to China.”⁵

The rule arrives during a fuel price spike tied to the war with Iran. AAA put the national average for regular gasoline at $4.47 a gallon on Monday, and diesel stood at $6.45. President Trump said Sunday that he is considering a ban on diesel exports. Electric vehicles made up 5.7% of new-vehicle sales in August, down from 7.4% for all of 2025, according to Cox Automotive, and the average new vehicle sold for $50,089 that month, according to Kelley Blue Book. Congress eliminated civil penalties for missing CAFE targets in the July 2025 budget law, which also ended federal tax credits of up to $7,500 for electric vehicle purchases.⁶

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

A Rule Written for Cars Not Yet Built

The number that matters most in Monday’s rule is a year: 2031. Automakers have already built or planned most of what they’ll sell through model year 2027, so this rule mostly governs cars that don’t exist yet, the ones that will leave dealer lots between 2028 and 2031 and stay on American roads well into the 2040s. A family that buys a crossover in 2031 will probably hand it down to a teenager years later. The people who will buy that car’s gasoline and breathe its exhaust include a good many who can’t vote on this rule, and some who haven’t been born.

The Church has a principle for exactly those people. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church calls care for the environment “a common and universal duty, that of respecting a common good, destined for all.”⁷ Then it stretches the circle forward in time. “Responsibility for the environment, the common heritage of mankind, extends not only to present needs but also to those of the future,” it says, and it quotes an older teaching to make the obligation personal: “we cannot refuse to interest ourselves in those who will come after us.”⁸

The Catechism puts the same limit on ownership itself, and where it puts it is worth noticing. Under the seventh commandment, the one against stealing, it teaches that the goods of creation are “by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity,” and that “Man’s dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come.”⁹ The Church files the careless use of the world under theft. What we waste today, we take from someone.

Pope Francis applied that to the air over our heads. “The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.”¹⁰ And he called the duty we owe to people not yet born “a basic question of justice, since the world we have received also belongs to those who will follow us.”¹¹

The Price of a Car Is a Moral Question Too

A Catholic should hear the administration’s case at full strength, because it’s a case about families. The average new vehicle sold for $50,089 in August. That’s out of reach for a lot of working households, and people who can’t afford a new car keep driving an old one with older safety equipment. The Transportation Department says the rule cuts $1,300 from the average new-vehicle price and saves Americans $138 billion over 5 years. If those numbers hold, that’s real money in real kitchens. Pope Francis wrote that the deterioration of the environment and of society “affects the most vulnerable people on the planet,”¹² and the most vulnerable are also the first people shut out of a showroom.

But a family pays for a car twice: once at the dealership, and then at the pump every week for years. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates the rule will cost the average driver about $1,400 more in fuel, and gasoline stood at $4.47 a gallon on Monday. When NHTSA adopted the Biden-era standards in 2024, it estimated that a more efficient car’s fuel savings would more than make up for its higher sticker price. I can’t referee those models from here. I can say which question the Church insists on asking. The Compendium says every economic activity that draws on natural resources should “foresee the costs involved, which are ‘an essential element of the actual cost of economic activity.’”¹³ A rule sold on sticker savings has to show the pump too. Otherwise it has counted half the bill.

The same paragraph of the Compendium answers the industry’s favorite phrase. Automakers praised the rule because, in their trade group’s words, the old standards were “out of step with market realities and customer demand.”¹⁴ Customers really are buying fewer electric cars; they made up 5.7% of new sales in August. The Compendium respects markets, but she is also clear about where their reach ends: “environmental protection cannot be assured solely on the basis of financial calculations of costs and benefits. The environment is one of those goods that cannot be adequately safeguarded or promoted by market forces.”¹⁵ A mileage standard exists for the costs a buyer never sees on the lot, the exhaust his neighbor breathes and the climate his grandchildren inherit.

Thomas on Changing a Law

St. Thomas Aquinas asked whether human law should ever change, and he said yes. It seems natural to human reason, he wrote, “to advance gradually from the imperfect to the perfect,” and later lawgivers rightly repair institutions that were “deficient in many ways.”¹⁶ If the 2024 standards misjudged what drivers would buy, as the administration and automakers argue, Thomas gives lawmakers room to correct them.

Then, in the very next article, he adds a warning that lands squarely on fuel economy. “The mere change of law is of itself prejudicial to the common good,” he writes, “because custom avails much for the observance of laws.” So a law “should never be changed, unless, in some way or other, the common weal be compensated according to the extent of the harm done in this respect.”¹⁷ Every change costs something just by being a change, and the new law has to earn that cost back.

Mileage rules are a case study in the cost Thomas meant. Standards written under President Obama were rolled back in President Trump’s first term, tightened again under President Biden, and cut again on Monday. An automaker plans a model years before it reaches a showroom, and every swing of the rule scraps some of that planning. The industry’s own trade group said this week that what it needs is “long-term regulatory stability that includes balanced, durable and achievable fuel economy standards that continue to reduce emissions and improve fuel economy.”¹⁸ That’s the auto industry asking for Thomas.

Here, Continuity Is Essential

Pope Francis saw this coming in 2015, in a paragraph that reads like commentary on this week. “Here, continuity is essential,” he wrote, “because policies related to climate change and environmental protection cannot be altered with every change of government. Results take time and demand immediate outlays which may not produce tangible effects within any one government’s term.”¹⁹ He named the temptation as well. “A politics concerned with immediate results, supported by consumerist sectors of the population, is driven to produce short-term growth.” Against it he set a standard: “True statecraft is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-term common good.”²⁰

These are difficult times at the pump. The rule arrived five weeks before the midterms, with gasoline at $4.47 and diesel at $6.45, and a promise of $1,300 off a new car is easy to hear in October. The rule’s defenders would answer that the Biden standards were written with an election in view too, and set targets automakers called out of step with what customers would buy. Maybe so. The Church’s standard binds both administrations equally. A mileage rule that flips with each new president fails the test of continuity, whichever direction it flips.

A Law That Outlasts Its Authors

So where does that leave a Catholic this week? The Church leaves the miles-per-gallon figure to engineers and lawmakers. Her teaching gives two honest tests. A fuel rule should count the whole cost of a car, including the cost carried by people who aren’t at the dealership: the driver paying at the pump for 15 years and the child breathing the exhaust in 2045. And it should be built to last. On the reporting so far, Monday’s rule struggles with both. Its headline figure weighs the sticker, and it’s one more swing of a pendulum that has moved with nearly every change of party in the White House for a decade.

Pope Francis also said where the remedy starts. Without “pressure from the public and from civic institutions,” he wrote, “political authorities will always be reluctant to intervene.”²¹ Congress created the fuel economy program in 1975. Congress could settle a standard both parties have to live with, instead of leaving the number to swing with each new Secretary of Transportation, and Catholics can ask their representatives for exactly that.

Closer to home: if you shop for a car this fall, do the arithmetic the rule skipped, and count the pump. And pray for the families filling their tanks at $4.47 this week, for the autoworkers whose jobs ride on these decisions, and for the children who will inherit the air we leave them.

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This story turns on care for creation as a common good: the environment belongs to all, including generations not yet born, and the laws that guard it have to be built to outlast the government that writes them.

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Notes

1. ↑ Alexa St. John and Anne D’Innocenzio, “Trump White House lowers fuel economy standards for cars, light trucks,” Associated Press via BNN Bloomberg, September 28, 2026, bnnbloomberg.ca; Mary Cunningham, “Trump administration rolls back Biden-era fuel economy standards,” CBS News, September 28, 2026, cbsnews.com; Kelly Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules for cars, light trucks,” Roll Call, September 28, 2026, rollcall.com.
2. ↑ Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules”; Callie Patteson and Maydeen Merino, “Daily on Energy: The CAFE standards rollback is official,” Washington Examiner, September 28, 2026, washingtonexaminer.com; Dan Peck and Ayesha Ali, “Trump administration rolls back fuel economy standards for automakers: What to know,” ABC News, September 28, 2026, abcnews.com.
3. ↑ Anne D’Innocenzio, “Trump administration lowers fuel economy standards, critics say at a significant environmental cost,” Associated Press via PBS News, September 28, 2026, pbs.org; Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules”; Brie Stimson, “Trump says he approved new fuel economy standards ending Biden-era electric vehicle mandate,” Fox Business, September 26, 2026, foxbusiness.com.
4. ↑ Peck and Ali, “Trump administration rolls back fuel economy standards”; St. John and D’Innocenzio, “Trump White House lowers fuel economy standards”; Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules.”
5. ↑ Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules”; St. John and D’Innocenzio, “Trump White House lowers fuel economy standards”; Peck and Ali, “Trump administration rolls back fuel economy standards”; Patteson and Merino, “Daily on Energy.”
6. ↑ Cunningham, “Trump administration rolls back Biden-era fuel economy standards”; St. John and D’Innocenzio, “Trump White House lowers fuel economy standards”; Patteson and Merino, “Daily on Energy”; Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules”; Stimson, “Trump says he approved new fuel economy standards.”
7. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 466, vatican.va.
8. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 467.
9. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2415, vatican.va.
10. ↑ Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 24, 2015), no. 23, vatican.va.
11. ↑ Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, no. 159.
12. ↑ Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, no. 48.
13. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 470.
14. ↑ Livingston, “Trump administration cuts mileage rules”; St. John and D’Innocenzio, “Trump White House lowers fuel economy standards.”
15. ↑ Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 470.
16. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 97, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org.
17. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 97, a. 2.
18. ↑ St. John and D’Innocenzio, “Trump White House lowers fuel economy standards”; Peck and Ali, “Trump administration rolls back fuel economy standards.”
19. ↑ Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, no. 181.
20. ↑ Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, no. 178.
21. ↑ Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, no. 181.

Books Cited

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• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Latin-English edition, Complete Set (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2012)