California officials vowed Thursday to fight for their right to have tougher fuel efficiency standards, after the Trump administration prepared to dramatically weaken stricter Obama-era rules.
“The Trump administration has launched a brazen attack, no matter how it is cloaked, on our nation’s clean car standards,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The California Department of Justice will use every legal tool at its disposal to defend today’s national standards and reaffirm the facts and science behind them. We are ready to do what is necessary to hold this administration accountable.”
The Trump administration on Thursday proposed to freeze fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions targets at 2020 levels through 2026, instead of raising them each year as previously required.
In its proposal, the Trump administration lays out a legal argument for revoking California’s waiver that allows it to set its own tougher fuel efficiency rules that other states may follow.
The states that follow California rules, including New York and Pennsylvania, account for roughly a third of the nation’s auto market.
“Eliminating California’s regulation of fuel economy will provide benefits to the American public,” the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say in their nearly 1,000 page proposed rule.
The Obama administration, seeking to cut carbon dioxide emissions, negotiated with automakers and California to reach a deal in 2011 that set a fuel efficiency standard at 54 miles per gallon by 2025 for cars and light trucks.
California, the nation’s largest market for zero-emission electric vehicles, could move to formally separate its rules from the national program if EPA weakens the standards. It has been allowed since 1967 to set its own fuel efficiency regulations, tougher than the national standards, because of severe local problems with smog.
“For Trump to now destroy a law first enacted at the request of Ronald Reagan five decades ago is a betrayal and an assault on the health of Americans everywhere,” California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Under his reckless scheme, motorists will pay more at the pump, get worse gas mileage and breathe dirtier air. California will fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.”
But the Trump administration argues the EPA under the Obama administration was wrong to grant subsequent waivers to California allowing the state to set tailpipe standards specifically to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
The Trump EPA says that while California should be allowed to continue regulating its extraordinary smog problem, climate change is different because it doesn’t affect California more than any other state.
California, and 17 other jurisdictions, already sued the Trump administration in May for rejecting the Obama administration’s fuel-efficiency rules and beginning the process of weakening them.
Attorneys general from 20 states issued a statement Thursday vowing to challenge the Trump administration’s latest proposal.
“The EPA is once again canceling environmental protections, putting the health of every American at risk and costing all of us hundreds of billions more at the pump,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat. “We will sue the EPA to stop this reckless and illegal plan.”
California officials and the Trump administration could still negotiate a common standard and maintain one national program that fulfills both of their goals.
“There is no justification for California to have its own standards,” EPA Assistant Administrator Bill Wehrum told reporters on a press call Thursday. “Having said that, we are committed to working with California to find mutually satisfiable regulations.”
