California sues feds over tailpipe emission rules
WASHINGTON — California and 23 other states on Friday filed suit against the Trump administration’s unprecedented legal reversal of the state’s authority to set its own rules on climatewarming tailpipe emissions.
The lawsuit represents the starting gun in a sweeping legal battle over states’ rights and climate change that is likely be resolved only once it reaches the Supreme Court. The decision could ultimately have wideranging repercussions affecting states’ control over their own environmental laws, the volume of pollution produced by the United States, and the future of the nation’s auto industry.
All the state attorneys general signing on to the suit are Democrats, but they represent several states that President Donald Trump won in 2016. States joining the lawsuit include Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“This is the fight of a lifetime for us,” said Mary Nichols, California’s top climate change official. “I believe we will win.”
The two top Trump administration officials overseeing the move defended it at a Thursday news conference at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington.
The abolishment of California’s stringent rule on tailpipe climate pollution — which 13 other states also follow — “meets President Trump’s commitment to establish uniform fuel economy standards for vehicles across the United States, ensuring that no state has the authority to impose its policies on everybody else in our whole country,” said Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Should the case reach the Supreme Court while Trump remains in office — a Democratic administration would be unlikely to defend the policy in court — administration officials say they are confident they will win. Legal experts say that view may have merit.
“It’s not an environmentally friendly court,” said Michael Gerrard, an expert in environmental law at Columbia University.
The Transportation Department and the EPA will jointly revoke a legal waiver, granted to California by the administration of Barack Obama under the authority of the 1970 Clean Air Act, allowing the state to set tighter state standards for greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle tailpipes.
The move is the first of a planned one-two punch designed by the Trump administration to unravel one of Obama’s signature climate change policies: In the coming weeks, the EPA and Transportation Department are also expected to roll back a national Obama-era tailpipe pollution standard that was based upon the California standard.
Andrew Wheeler, the administrator of the EPA, noted that in its pursuit of lowering greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, California sought to set higher vehicle fuel economy standards than the rest of the country. Currently, the national fuel economy standard, which was designed to follow California’s standard, requires automakers to to build vehicles that achieve an average fuel economy of 54.5 mpg by 2025, cutting about 6 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution over the lifetime of those vehicles.
The Trump administration is planning to roll back that standard to about 37 mpg. But with the waiver in place, California and the states that follow its standard could keep that tighter fuel-economy requirement.
Wheeler, however, noted that under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, states are not allowed to set fuel economy standards, and thus made the case that California’s separate fuel economy standards are illegal.