California wasted no time in suing the Trump administration over its push to eliminate the state’s authority to independently regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars.
The state’s Democratic attorney general, Xavier Becerra, led a coalition of 22 other states and three cities to bring a lawsuit Friday against the Department of Transportation. The department, along with the Environmental Protection Agency, unveiled a series of joint actions Thursday to pull back California’s authority to set and enforce greenhouse gas limits stricter than federal levels.
“I started my career litigating to clean up the air in California with one of the first Clean Air Act cases ever filed,” Mary Nichols, California’s top air regulator, said in a statement. “I won then and we will win now.”
The attorneys general are suing the Transportation Department’s finding that federal law preempts any state, including California, from regulating cars’ greenhouse gases because such standards overlap with fuel economy limits.
In a separate action Thursday, the EPA announced it would withdraw a waiver it granted California in 2013 to set its own greenhouse gas limits for passenger cars. California has had the special ability under the Clean Air Act to set its own tailpipe pollution limits since the law was written in the 1970s, so long as the EPA grants the state such a waiver.
Once California adopts its own standards, other states can sign onto them. To date, 13 states have done so, and together, those states and California represent more than a third of the U.S. auto market. All 13 states following California’s standards joined the Golden State in the new lawsuit.
California’s lawsuit is the latest blow in the fight between the state and the Trump administration over the future of fuel economy standards. And it comes as the EPA appears to be teeing up its own attack on a deal California made with four automakers in July on standards weaker than the Obama levels but much stricter than the Trump administration’s plans.
The Trump administration has proposed to freeze the fuel economy limits at 2020 levels, a scenario that even most automakers have said publicly they don’t support.
The lawsuit is California’s 60th challenge against the Trump administration and its second legal brawl over the fuel economy standards. California and a number of states have already sued the EPA over its April 2018 determination it would revise its greenhouse gas limits for passenger cars from the Obama-era levels.
