A coalition of conservative groups urged Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on Wednesday to revoke California’s ability to set its own strict fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles.
“The EPA has a responsibility to American citizens, but not one to promote solutions that require expensive taxpayer-funded infrastructure spending and subsidies, particularly at questionable environmental gains,” the groups wrote in a letter to Pruitt. “The American people deserve better, and if you do not act fast, come April 1, people across the state of California will be facing unrealistic and costly mandates which threaten their basic right to choose.”
The 11 groups on the letter include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Tax Reform.
The EPA is expected to say this week that the Obama administration’s rules on fuel economy for cars and light-duty trucks, such as pickups and sport utility vehicles, must be revised for model years 2022-2025, although the agency won’t immediately propose new requirements.
The EPA under Pruitt has long been expected to ease the rules, negotiated with the auto industry in 2011, that would require automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, said Tuesday he is prepared to sue the EPA if it begins relaxing the fuel efficiency standards. California is a leader on combating human-induced carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. The state is the nation’s largest market for zero-emission, electric vehicles.
Federal law since 1967 has allowed California, because of severe air pollution problems caused by smog, to set its own fuel efficiency regulations that can be tougher than the national standards. Other states can follow California’s standards instead of the national rules. Those states account for about one-third of the U.S. auto market.
California could move to formally separate its rules from the national program if EPA weakens the standards.
That means California and other states that follow its tougher rules would require automakers operating in those states to follow the more stringent state regulations, even if the EPA weakens the national standard, creating a patchwork of regulations.
Pruitt told Bloomberg this month that “California is not the arbiter of these issues” and suggested the state should comply with the national standards.
He can revoke California’s waiver to get it to follow whatever new rules he tries to establish, but that has never been done before.
“No waiver has ever been revoked, and it’s not clear exactly what the process would be to do that, which poses an entirely different challenge we haven’t seen before,” Dave Cooke, a senior vehicle analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Washington Examiner.
