A core California climate tool is under threat this election. How are leaders bracing for impact?
In the push to stop burning fossil fuels, California may find itself becoming less of a national power player after November.
That’s if Donald Trump or the Supreme Court dismantles one of the state’s key weapons against carbon emissions, a half-century old Environmental Protection Agency waiver program that allows California to set regulations that are stronger than federal rules.
“If California has its authority under the Clean Air Act limited, that is a blow,” said Ann Carlson, who served as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under Joe Biden. “Not just to California, but the whole country. California’s leadership is often followed by other states and frankly by the federal government.”
In anticipation of this threat, environmental law experts and elected officials are looking at other ways to push toward a zero-emission economy — from deals with private industry to tax incentives and bolstering state policies.
California has the unique ability to set tailpipe emissions standards under the Clean Air Act that are stricter than federal rules once it gets permission through a waiver. Right now, eight waivers for truck, tugboat, passenger car, lawn mower and train mowers are pending.
Erosion of this authority could push California further off track from its goal to significantly reduce emissions by 2030. It would also come amid discouraging signs for the global push to address global warming since countries promised to cut carbon emissions nearly a decade ago.
The threats to this power are twofold, said Carlson.
“One is, if Trump is elected, he has made it clear he won’t allow California to move forward and roll back all the climate rules,” said Carlson, who is now a UCLA environmental law professor. “The other one is that even if Harris were elected, the Supreme Court looms large over the California waiver provision.”
The waiver program beganin the 1950s, when California faced public health pressures to address severe air quality problems due to vehicle emissions in Los Angeles. Laws passed in response to the crisis were the first air pollution control laws in the nation.
Over time, the state has used this waiver power to implement more aggressive vehicle emission standards on newly recognized pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. More than a dozen other states have followed suit.
State and federal leaders have celebrated the waiver program as a cornerstone of the nation’s environmental and public health successes.The effort pushed the transportation industry to innovate and accelerated the shift towards zero-emission technology.
But this authority to lead the way on air pollution standards has become a point of contention, particularly under the Trump administration, which sought to revoke the state’s waiver before president Biden restored it.
Trump has made his disdain for California’s clean transportation rules clear. “I will not allow California politicians to get away with their plan to impose a 100 percent ban on the sale of gas powered cars and trucks,” he said at a recent rally in Coachella.
The infamous rightwing blueprint Project 2025, which Trump has sought to disavow, also has plans to cut expert staff from major agencies such as the EPA and replace them with political appointees.
Environmentalists are pushing the EPA to expedite the approval of those waivers in anticipation of Trump’s possible reelection, but it may be in vain. Recent Supreme Court cases limiting the agency’s authority have climate leaders worried that California’s waiver is next on the chopping block.
Industry lawsuits against California’s many clean transportation rules are common. One case the court could take up is Ohio V. EPA, a challenge by the Western States Trucking Association against California’s truck sales mandate that is currently on hold.
“I think it’s very apparent to anyone who’s an expert in this system that we can’t just sort of stand around and wait for Samuel Alito to punch us in the face,” said Craig Segall, vice president of the environmental group Evergreen Action. “That is unacceptably risky.”
But a core piece of California’s environmental rules and programs do not require federal waivers. Those include the billions in Inflation Reduction Act funding and a state bond on the November ballot to raise $10 billion in climate-related projects.
Among other programs, Biden’s landmark climate law is expected to support the state’s transition to clean energy with funding for renewables, to modernize the electric grid and expand EV charging infrastructure. The state climate bond, Prop 4, will also fund a wide variety of programs from clean drinking water to habitat restoration across the state.
If Kamala Harris is elected president, California keeps an ally in the EPA but the Supreme Court threat remains. Whatever happens, said state senator Henry Stern, the stakes are too high to slow down on pursuing the state’s targets aggressively through other means.
The Air Resources Board declined to provide an interview for this story, but offered a written statement saying “California has set world-leading goals to slash greenhouse gas emissions and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, and we will continue working to meet these targets.”
The state’s most powerful climate regulator is facing a key vote on November 8 on a longstanding transportation climate program, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. The agency will soon begin a process to renew the state’s flagship market-based emissions trading program, cap-and-trade.
“I hope that the seriousness and the closeness of the federal elections sort of dawns on everybody that we really don’t have room to mess around here,” Stern said.”We have to get ahead of this stuff. We just can’t afford not to.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "A core California climate tool is under threat this election. How are leaders bracing for impact?."