The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has Prepared a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) to disclose and analyze the potential environmental impacts of the agency's newly proposed fuel consumption standards for commercial medium- and heavy-duty on-highway vehicles and work trucks, which NHTSA recently proposed.
NHTSA invites Federal, State, and local agencies, and the public to submit written comments on the DEIS.To facilitate review of the DEIS, NHTSA has posted the DEIS on its Web site (http://www.nhtsa.gov/ fuel-economy) and placed it in the agency's docket, identified by the docket number at the beginning of this notice. NHTSA will consider all public comments received on the DEIS in preparing final NEPA documents to support final fuel consumption standards, which NHTSA plans to issue next year.
To ensure that NHTSA has the opportunity to consider comments on the DEIS, NHTSA must receive written comments by January 3, 2011. NHTSA will try to consider comments received after that date to the extent the NEPA and rulemaking schedules allow. Concurrent with the DEIS, NHTSA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a joint proposed rulemaking that would reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from and increase the fuel efficiency of HD vehicles. The joint proposed rules will be published in the near future in the Federal Register. NHTSA is proposing fuel consumption standards under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), and EPA is proposing GHG emissions standards under the Clean Air Act.
EPA's proposed GHG emissions standards would begin with model year (MY) 2014. NHTSA's proposed fuel consumption standards would be optional in MYs 2014 and 2015, becoming mandatory beginning in MY 2016 for most regulatory categories.