Eleven Democratic senators have signed a letter to Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt calling on him not to do what’s rumored could happen this week: rolling back the fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks and prohibiting California from imposing stricter standards than the federal government does. All this could be a major setback for electric cars. That, of course, makes no never mind to Pr*sident Trump or Pruitt, both of them climate science deniers, and both attached at the hip and wallet to the fossil fuel industry.

Led by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, the senators, all Democrats except for independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, wrote:

These automobile emissions standards are economically feasible and technologically achievable for the auto industry as the Final Determination demonstrates. They will enhance our national security by reducing our consumption of foreign oil. They will benefit consumers, saving them billions of dollars at the pump and reduce our carbon pollution. They provide certainty to the auto industry, which is already investing in the technologies and designs for the vehicles they will sell in these later years of the program. It is critical that they remain in place.

The standards—formally known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)—were first established in 1975 in the wake of the Arab oil embargo. They imposed a rise in fuel economy that boosted the average efficiency of passenger cars from 18.5 miles per gallon in 1978 to 27.5 mpg in 1985. But that is where they stayed for the next 26 years.

Then in 2011, President Obama jawboned a reluctant but economically beleaguered auto industry into agreeing to double that average to 54.5 mpg by 2025. Today, the average is hovering around 36 mpg, right where it was supposed to be for the 2017 models.

Republicans know that if and when the Congressional Budget Office gets done scoring their Obamacare repeal and "replacement" plan it will be bad. Lots and lots of people—maybe 15 million?—will lose insurance and the costs to the treasury will be huge. So they're trying to head off bad headlines by saying what the CBO says just doesn't really matter. Oh, and telling lies, too.

“If you go back to what CBO predicted would be covered on the exchanges today [under the ACA] they’re only off by only a two-to-one ratio,” Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) told reporters. CBO said “21 million projected would be covered, but only 10 million people are covered.” […]

Republicans are making clear that they don’t have a ton of confidence in the agency’s estimates but acknowledge CBO scores are still the standard for congressional debates.

“The CBO score was wildly inaccurate [on the ACA] and we knew it was going to be, but those are the rules we have to go by,” said Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.).

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he has “never been one who worried too much about scores because there are constraints that the bean counters have to operate under that don’t necessarily comport with reality.”

That there would be alternative facts, since 21 million is the number for people who are covered under Obamacare. And, by the way, the CBO forecasts made in 2010 on how much Obamacare would cost were wrong because they were way too high: "Instead of $1.35 trillion in costs from 2016 through 2025, Affordable Care Act-related expenditures are expected to be $1.207 trillion, the CBO said. That is an 11 percent reduction."

We've already seen an estimate from the CBO about what could happen with the repeal bill the House used as the basis for the current Ryancare bill, and it was really bad. They estimated the number of uninsured would increase by 18 million in the first year after enactment and that premiums would increase by as much as 25 percent in the first year. The number of uninsured would increase to 32 million by 2026, and premiums would double by 2026.

There are a few sops toward replacement in this Ryancare proposal, so those numbers might not be quite as dire, but they're still going to be really bad. Standard and Poors say from 6-10 million will lose insurance, a number that would be higher, but they expect “bigger states like New York and California cover from their own pockets in the future.” Brookings Institute analysts peg the number losing insurance at 15 million. But, like Republicans have been saying today, "We've paid way too much attention to coverage."

There couldn't be a Republican health care bill that doesn't continue the War on Women—because there can't be a Republican anything that isn't a direct assault on women's rights, or women’s health, or women’s bank accounts. And Ryancare is pretty much all three.

In short, if the House GOP plan were signed into law as-is, women could face financial repercussions for being poor, or for using birth control, or for not using birth control, or for giving birth, or for having children who need medical care. How many iPhones does an out-of-pocket Cesarean Section cost? [...]

Stephanie Glover, senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women and Families, lays out the AHCA's one-two-three-four punch to women's health thusly: "One by one this would be really bad for women's health. Packaged in a single bill is pretty alarming." […]

It's also not clear who will be paying for health care for poor women and their families under this new plan, if not insurance or government assistance. Money does not simply materialize because Paul Ryan thinks freedom is the ability to buy things. Prior to the passage of the ACA, the poor and uninsured waited to seek health care until it was serious enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. Then, because they had no way to pay the bill, they'd skip out on it. Which drove the price of other people's health care up. One way or another, unless doctors are suddenly supposed to turn a blind eye to women who can't afford reproductive health care giving birth in the streets, somebody is going to pay for their health care.

Cutting Medicaid, taking Medicaid funding away from Planned Parenthood, getting rid of birth control coverage, getting rid of abortion coverage, and just plain old making health insurance too expensive for everyone—including women who earn less than men—all mean that women are a particular target of Ryancare, and poor women especially. As usual.

Why would a sitting president wake up at 6:30 AM on a Saturday and take to Twitter to level wild conspiratorial claims about a past president? Sure, Donald Trump is unhinged, but journalist Robert Costa pinpointed on MSNBC Tuesday what's really haunting Trump's first few months in office.

He truly thinks day to day about President Obama and he compares himself to how much President Obama was able to accomplish in his first few months in office. Why? He is somewhat haunted, as some put it to me, by President Obama's first term. I'm not sure, I'm not a psychologist. But he does often talk about what President Obama was able to do with a Democratic Congress back in 2009.

Those comparisons have not figured favorably for Trump. A series of articles along with cable news coverage over the past several weeks have noted that while Obama logged several major legislative wins within his first months in office, Trump has been forced to scrap his biggest executive action to date (the Muslim ban), has resorted to continually insisting that his precious border wall will be built, and has been resigned to signing into law several relatively obscure (though destructive) regulatory changes. That's a pathetic scorecard, frankly, when compared to Obama's whirlwind of activity, including enacting a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

So as Congress embarks on Paul Ryan's fraught effort to repeal health care for millions, that's the lens through which Trump approaches the task at hand.

To the miner let me say that he stands where the farmer does—the work of the world waits on him. If he slackens or fails, armies and statesmen are helpless. — Woodrow Wilson

I worked in coal mining for 32 years. I won’t go so far as to call myself a miner, because only a fraction of that was spent actually loading explosives in a surface mine, or working construction underground. Most of my time I was that other thing, a “company man.” 

But I know. I know how being a miner is unlike any other job.

What you’re going to do today (and tomorrow, and the day after) is dirty, difficult, and above all dangerous. The men riding down beside you on the lift aren’t just co-workers. Your life depends on them. The guy running the roof bolter is literally responsible for keeping the sky from falling. The electricians are running cables carrying not 120 volts, but thousands of volts, in a place where every spark is a threat. Every person driving a mantrip or scoop is whipping around in the dark, making dozens of blind, 90 degree turns. Even the lowliest newbie in the mine is building block walls and hanging curtains that help the ventilation fans sweep away accumulations of explosive gas and drive fresh air to where you work.

In the surface mines, you’re dealing with amounts of explosives that would make most armies shake in their combat boots. You’re driving trucks that carry 100, 200, 400 tons of crushed rock or coal in a single trip—trucks so big you reach the cab along stairways that double-back multiple times. Trucks so big they can run over a pickup and never notice the bump. Trucks so big that you can’t see a man on the ground unless he’s a football field away. Then you’re driving those trucks next to 200’ drops while other guys in ‘dozers and smaller vehicles scramble to avoid impossibly huge tires.

From the continuous miner operator to the belt walker, the top dogs in the dragline to the water truck driver, every single worker in a vast machine that may be spread out over 100 square miles of surface, or nested dozens of miles underground, is utterly vital and intimately connected.

But the reason miners are so passionate about their job goes beyond just that close bond with fellow miners. It’s that thing at the top of the article. That “work of the world waits on him” bit. There are songs about how “coal keeps the lights on.” There’s a romance that wanders through “16 tons” and past a lot of coal miner’s daughters. From the stickers on the hardhats to the banners in the mine parking lot, miners are reminded every day that what they are doing is important, vital to the nation. They are still Wilson’s “great service army.” 

They’re not just risking their lives. They’re risking them for you, America. Only … that’s no longer true. And I’m sorry. Really sorry. But it’s not.

For about an hour Tuesday night, the Statue of Liberty went dark. With multiple women’s actions coming today, one immediate thought was that it could have been a purely coincidental yet powerful moment of solidarity with women. But a second—and less inspiring—thought was that it instead represented our moral failure to continue being a beacon of hope and refuge for the world’s persecuted.

How badly are we failing at our job to protect the most vulnerable in the world? Enough that refugees who wanted nothing more than to be in the U.S. are now fleeing our government-sanctioned cloud of nativism for the safety of Canada:

Chris Crowningshiele has been driving a cab, on and off, for 30 years in this rural corner of upstate New York known as the North Country. He lives south of here in Plattsburgh, and his fares usually come from ferrying students from a state university there or picking shoppers up at a Walmart in his gray minivan. But in recent weeks, riders have been asking him — two, three, sometimes as many as seven times a day — to bring them to the end of Roxham Road.

He is carrying them on the last leg of their journey out of the United States. Just on the other side of that sign is Canada. Border officials and aid workers there say there has been a surge in people illegally crossing from the United States in the months since President Trump was elected, many of them natives of Muslim countries making bids for asylum [...] 

Mr. Crowningshiele picks up passengers in Plattsburgh, mostly at the airport or the bus station, and over the 25-mile drive north, they have told him that they had traveled from across the country. Some were migrants from Yemen and Turkey. They confided that they were fearful, of what was happening in the countries they wanted to leave behind — not just their homeland but now also the United States — and of what they faced once they stepped out of Mr. Crowningshiele’s cab.

“You wonder what’s going through their heads, you know?” he said. Many of his passengers have been families, with parents carrying young children and whatever possessions they could take with them.

“People just want to live their life,” Mr. Crowningshiele, 48, said, “and not be scared.”

This is the 487th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the March 4 Green Spotlight. More than 26,580 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES

The breakneck speed with which Paul Ryan is trying to ram through his Obamacare repeal and replacement-if-you-squint-at-it-and-are-a-Republican bill was matched with an unceasing flurry of stories about the politics and the policies of the thing. Two House committees began marking up the bill, despite the fact that there have been no hearings on it yet, a point Democrats made over and over and over in each committee. There wasn't a lot of progress made on that front, but there was an awful lot of ridiculous today, anyway. Lets start with the best part:
 

It is absolutely not "Trumpcare," says everybody in the White House—Health Secretary Tom Price, press secretary Sean Spicer, and her:

“I’ll call it Trumpcare if you want to, but I didn’t hear President Trump say to any of us, ‘Hey I want my name on that,’” [Kellyanne] Conway told Fox News. “We’re happy it is the American Health Care Act. This is serious stuff. This isn’t about branding according to someone’s name.”

We saw two other major developments from the Republicans, related to one another: one, what the Congressional Budget Office says about the bill doesn't mean anything to anyone (contra Sean Spicer circa 2014 when the CBO's word was gold); and two, the point of this bill isn't the number of people insured but people's ability to get care. Yeah, that old "access" shtick that's a slightly more sophisticated version than "you can always just go to the emergency room."

These are related, because the CBO will almost certainly find that millions of people are going to lose insurance. So Office of Management and Budget Chief Mick Mulvaney made a point today of saying insurance isn't the "end goal" of the bill, and Spicer joined in with "How many people are going to be covered—that’s not the question." That's how you know the number of newly uninsured people is going to look really bad when the CBO report comes out. Meanwhile, the extremists are just mad because it doesn't take insurance away fast enough.

Here are some of the other highlights of the day.

A federal judge on Wednesday granted a motion filed by Hawaii to amend its original complaint concerning Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. The state will now legally challenge Trump’s second Muslim ban signed on Monday. Chris Geidner writes:

“This second Executive Order is infected with the same legal problems as the first Order — undermining bedrock constitutional and statutory guarantees,” the lawyers write in the new challenge.

The lawyers for Hawaii told a federal court earlier Tuesday that they planned to file a challenge to the new executive order on Wednesday.

The proposed amended complaint in Hawaii v. Trump was filed late Tuesday night, however, along with a motion asking the court to resume the case — which had been put on hold — and allow the state to file the amended complaint. US District Judge Derrick Watson granted the requests on Wednesday.

This marks the first legal challenge to Trump’s do-over on the Muslim ban. It certainly won’t be the last. 

House Speaker Paul Ryan finally managed to cull together that Obamacare repeal plan—after seven years!—mostly by cutting and pasting from the actual Affordable Care Act and then calling it good. That approach immediately outraged his friends on the far right because it leaves intact too many pieces of the existing law—like health insurance for people. And people having health insurance isn't the point of this for most Republicans. Rather, tax policies that give breaks to wealthy people are the point of everything the Republicans do. And this bill definitely does that, but it also still lets some people who might be undeserving actually keep both their iPhones and have insurance.

The opposition to Ryancare from public interest and healthcare sector organizations, however, puts the focus back on the policy, and they hate the bill because it doesn't do enough on the health insurance front. Take the AARP, which is blasting the bill as an "Age Tax" that "would weaken Medicare’s fiscal sustainability, dramatically increase health care costs for Americans aged 50-64, and put at risk the health care of millions of children and adults with disabilities, and poor seniors who depend on the Medicaid program for longterm services and supports and other benefits."

They note that the "typical senior seeking coverage through an exchange has a median annual income of under $25,000 and already pays significant out-of-pocket costs for health care." Here's where the Age Tax comes in, because the bill allows insurance companies to charge as much as five times more for premiums for older Americans, and the tax credits they would be able to get don't meet those premium hikes. AARP estimates an $8400 hike in premiums  for a 64-year-old making $15,000 a year under Ryancare—and that's not counting copays. They estimate that a 55-year old earning $25,000 will see an increase in premiums of more than $2,300 a year, and a 64-year old earning $25,000 that increase rises to more than $4,400 a year. That's the consumer side of opposition and AARP is by no means alone, but they represents a key group: the older Americans who also happen to be the Republican base. Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer, by the way, calls them an "interest group.” That should go over well.

There's plenty of opposition on the provider side, too.

“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are,” goes an old Mexican saying, translated into English. These days, Donald Trump’s administration appears to be walking with a Breitbart contributor, an “ethnic cleansing” conspiracy theorist, and a reality show reject (not Trump!) who invented some sort of  “survivalist” tool to use following the collapse of society (which is super reassuring these days). 

This is all according to a report detailing hundreds of new officials quietly installed across the highest reaches of the government. While high-profile trainwrecks—er, nominees like Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry have been the ones to make headlines due to Senate confirmation, “members of these so-called ‘beachhead teams’ have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.” After a quick read, it’s no surprise they don’t want to talk about them:

Curtis Ellis was a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a website best known for its enthusiastic embrace of the false notion that President Obama born outside the United States. A column headlined the “The Radical Left’s Ethnic Cleansing of America” won Ellis an admiring interview with Steve Bannon, now Trump’s top aide. He is a longtime critic of trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department. Asked about his role in a brief phone interview Tuesday, he said: “Nothing I can tell you.”

Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called “The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.” He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart.

Perdue was featured on CNBC’s reality series “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor” for his invention, the Packbow, which Perdue came up with while studying “collapsed societies, and what people who lived in those societies came up with to either defend themselves or to survive.” It’s a bow and arrow that doubles as a compass, tent pole, walking stick, spearfishing rig, and water purification tablet receptacle.

Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department. The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

John Jaggers ran the Trump campaign in Maryland and Virginia, where he made headlines for endorsing the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was “very, very sick and they’re covering it up.” As he put it last August: “The woman who seeks to be the first female president of the United States wears a wool coat at every single thing. Have you ever stopped to wonder why? It’s a big deal, folks.”

Jaggers was hired Jan. 20 as senior adviser at the General Services Administration, which oversees tens of billions of dollars of government procurement every year. But records show he left the job on March 3. He declined to comment.

Happy International Women’s Day. Here’s a good reason to remind the world how much women contribute, whether by striking or taking other action:

Notice how women with advanced degrees make less than men with college degrees?

And, of course, racial inequality makes things even worse—black and Latina women face a bigger wage gap than white or Asian women.