17 states sue EPA over proposed rollback of emissions rules

May 10th, 2018 by Dakota Software Staff

A fight between California, among the most economically and politically influential states in the U.S., and the federal government has long been simmering. But on May 1, a lawsuit filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia made those tensions official. California and a "coalition" of 16 other states are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its proposed changes to auto emissions regulations that are widely considered a rollback toward more lax rules.

"California has long exercised its right to enforce its own strict pollution laws."

As just the latest example of the state's political stature, this is hardly the first time California has challenged sweeping federal mandates, either in environmental policy or anything else. Since the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, the state has been given the authority to codify and enforce its own, stricter rules aimed to curbing air pollution. That includes frameworks to monitor and reduce the amount of various pollutants created by gasoline powered vehicles. Over time, California's harder limits on automobile pollutants were adopted by many other states, essentially standardizing them across the U.S.

Background of the legal battle

By 2012, then-President Barack Obama directed the EPA to work with states like California and roll their auto emissions rules into a unified federal standard. Among these provisions were those around the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Program (CAFE), which aimed to reduce air pollution from auto emissions primarily through enforcing an industry-wide cap on fuel consumption in new cars and trucks. At the time of the 2012 update, CAFE regulations were supposed to push the average mile-per-gallon rating of all consumer automobiles sold in the U.S. to 35.5. CAFE would continue inching that ceiling higher each year through 2025, when the average fuel efficiency of all brand-new consumer vehicles would reach 54.5 mpg.

Now, with a new administration in control of the federal government, one with remarkably different priorities from its predecessor, industry regulators and corporate leaders appear emboldened to make a change. For Scott Pruitt, the current administrator of the EPA, that meant not only rolling back emissions rules put in place during the Obama years, but even older precedents like California's long-established right to supersede federal environmental laws.

Issues at stake

The laws at the center of this new legal challenge between the EPA and California are little more than official proposals, and it's not yet clear how soon they could be signed into law. A draft of the proposed changes released jointly April 27 by the EPA and the Department of Transportation outlined eight different routes the agencies could take in revising existing tailpipe emissions standards. The New York Times reported that the most preferable of those eight proposals would essentially freeze CAFE program standards at their 2020 levels.

In addition, the April 27 draft argued that California did not have the right to impose its own environmental standards. Under the Clean Air Act, California was granted a waiver to do just that, but Pruitt and the current administration argue that the waiver applies only to specific airborne pollutants, and that regulating "greenhouse gas" emissions is equivalent to regulating fuel economy. Under a 1975 law, states are not allowed to set their own fuel economy limits. However, multiple federal court cases brought against California have failed to prove that the state's limits on greenhouse gas emissions is tantamount to a fuel efficiency mandate.

Besides the 16 other attorneys general signed onto the lawsuit, California would also appear to have legal precedent on its side in this new fight against federal regulators. Still, it's a legal battle that few expect to see resolved any time soon.