California strikes back against Trump’s auto pollution rollback

Last week, the Trump administration unveiled one of its most consequential environmental rollbacks yet, a plan to let cars pollute more while stripping California of its right to set its own air-quality rules.

On Tuesday, California opened its counteroffensive, laying out in a report a scathing rebuttal that the state’s clean-air regulator, Mary Nichols, said would inform its legal and regulatory battle with Washington in the coming months and years.

The administration’s proposal “is contrary to the facts and the law,” the California document says, before refuting point by point the Trump administration’s arguments for weakening the nation’s long-term goals for making vehicles more fuel efficient and less polluting.

The clash between California and Washington threatens to throw the U.S. auto market into disarray. Because California has the authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own air pollution rules and because a dozen other states follow its lead, the dispute could effectively split the nation’s market into two, one side adhering to stringent emissions rules set in Sacramento and the other to weaker federal standards.

As a first step, California plans to change its rules to declare that the federal government’s current, stricter auto-emission targets are the only ones that comply with state law — and not any future targets that are less strict.

That move collides with the administration’s plan to freeze Obama-era rules, which would have required automakers by 2025 to roughly double the fuel economy of their new cars, pickup trucks and SUVs to about 36 mpg. Those rules, which are aimed at cutting tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming, represented one of President Barack Obama’s most significant efforts to fight climate change.

The Trump proposal would instead freeze the standards after 2021, when new cars must average around 30 mpg.