The Fresh York Times
March 24, 2017
California’s clean-air agency voted on Friday to shove ahead with stricter emissions standards for cars and trucks, setting up a potential legal battle with the Trump administration over the state’s plan to reduce planet-warming gases.
The vote, by the California Air Resources Board, is the boldest indication yet of California’s plan to stand up to President Trump’s agenda. Leading politicians in the state, from the governor down to many mayors, have promised to lead the resistance to Mr. Trump’s policies.
Mr. Trump, backing industry over environmental concerns, said easing emissions rules would help stimulate auto manufacturing. He vowed last week to loosen the regulations. Automakers are aggressively pursuing those switches after years of supporting stricter standards.
But California can write its own standards because of a longstanding waiver granted under the Clean Air Act, providing the state — the country’s largest auto market — major sway over the auto industry. Twelve other states, including Fresh York and Pennsylvania, as well as Washington, D.C., go after California’s standards, a coalition that covers more than one hundred thirty million residents and more than a third of the vehicle market in the United States.
“All of the evidence — call it science, call it economics — shows that if anything, these standards should be even more aggressive,” said the board member Daniel Sperling, a transportation accomplished at the University of California, Davis.
The board’s chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, was even more pointed, admonishing automakers for milking Mr. Trump for favors.
“What were you thinking when you threw yourselves upon the grace of the Trump administration to attempt to solve your problems?” she asked. “Let’s take act today, and let’s budge on.”
Long a forerunner in environmental regulation, California worked with the Obama administration on joint standards that became a crucial part of the country’s effort to combat climate switch. Officials said the regulations would reduce the country’s oil consumption by twelve billion barrels and eliminate six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution over the lifetime of the cars affected. That amounts to more than a year’s worth of America’s carbon emissions.
Adopted in 2012, the standards would require automakers to almost dual the average fuel economy of fresh cars and trucks by 2025, to 54.Five miles per gallon, forcing automakers to speed development of very fuel-efficient vehicles, including hybrid and electrified cars. Mr. Trump intends to lower that target.
Friday’s unanimous vote by the 14-member board, which affirmed the higher standards through 2025, amounted to a public rejection of Mr. Trump’s plans.
Now, the question is how — or whether — the Trump administration will treat California’s dissent. The administration could choose to revoke California’s waiver, at which point experts expect the state would sue.
California sued the George W. Pubic hair administration after it challenged California’s waiver in 2007. Mr. Obama reversed the federal challenge.
The White House and the E.P.A., which have not yet determined their plans for the California waiver, did not instantly react to a request for comment.
Several states that go after California’s rules raced to its defense. “We’ve come a long way together,” said Steven Flint, director of the air resources division of the Fresh York Department of Environmental Conservation. “We’re with you, and we believe in what you’re doing.”
Environmentalists and public health experts have criticized the automakers’ resistance to emissions rules under the Trump administration as an about-face. All major automakers previously voiced support for the more stringent standards.
After the election of Mr. Trump, a group indicating the nation’s largest makers of cars and light trucks urged a reassessment of the emissions rules, which the group said posed a “substantial challenge” for the auto industry.
Automakers now complain about the steep technical challenge that the stringent standards pose. They have estimated that only about Three.Five percent of fresh vehicles are able to reach it, and that their industry would have to spend a “staggering” $200 billion by two thousand twenty five to serve.
A separate investigate by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a think tank supporting emissions controls, has estimated that the cost of meeting those standards could be overstated by as much as forty percent. And auto industry experts have warned that a slowdown in America’s shift toward efficient cars could leave its auto market a global laggard.
John Bozzella, chief executive of Global Automakers, an industry trade group, said before the California vote that companies agreed on the need to proceed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve fuel economy. But he urged California to fall into line with federal rules.
“There is a more effective way forward than regulatory systems that are different,” Mr. Bozzella said. He also suggested that request for clean cars remained relatively lil’.
What was required, he said, were standards that “balance innovation, compliance and consumer needs and wants.”
Automakers have also been critical of a California’s zero-emission vehicle program, which requires automakers to sell a certain percentage of electrical cars and trucks in California and nine other states. The board voted on Friday to proceed that program.
Politicians in California, one of the country’s most Democratic states, have embraced acting as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s policies, promising to defend the state’s laws on immigration, health care and the environment. Many cities in California have broad “sanctuary” policies aimed at protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants. State law also provides some protections for immigrants from being turned over to federal authorities for deportation.
In addition, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, proclaimed that California would proceed to work toward its legally required target of reducing carbon emissions to forty percent below one thousand nine hundred ninety levels by 2030. And the state has retained Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general, to advise on potential legal fights with the White House.
Even at the federal level, the president’s announcement alone will not be enough to instantaneously roll back emissions standards, a process expected to take more than a year of legal and regulatory reviews by the E.P.A. and the Transportation Department. The Trump administration would then need to propose its own replacement fuel-economy standards.
Still, the Trump administration’s budge to ease emissions rules is the very first part of an expected onslaught on Mr. Obama’s environmental legacy. In the coming weeks, Mr. Trump is also expected to announce that he will direct the E.P.A. to dismantle Obama-era regulations on pollution from coal-fired power plants.
The E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, has said he does not think carbon dioxide is a primary cause of global heating, a statement at odds with the scientific consensus on climate switch.
Bonnie Holmes-Gen of the American Lung Association of California, one of many health and environmental groups that spoke at the board meeting, said moving away from stringent emissions standards would hurt public health and the health of the planet. She urged the state to stay its course.
“The public is bearing a yam-sized cost — billions of dollars in health expenses and harm from climate,” Ms. Holmes-Gen said. “I urge California to keep us on track.”
An article on Saturday about California`s upholding its auto emissions standards misstated the position that Steven Flint holds at the Fresh York Department of Environmental Conservation. He is director of the air resources division, not the director of the department.