California stands in way of EPA’s effort to end electric vehicle mandate

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin laid waste Wednesday to the Biden Administration’s climate agenda, in line with Donald Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” executive order. 

“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” Zeldin said in an announcement that the EPA would be reviewing dozens of EPA rules and findings.

Among the rules being targeted for review are those that created what many call the electric vehicle mandate. While the Trump administration could review and overturn those rules, Kenny Stein, vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), warns that, to fully end the de facto EV mandate, the administration has to deal with the third prong of former President Joe Biden’s war on gas-powered cars: his EPA's waiver for California’s Advanced Clean Cars II Regulations. 

As California goes...

The rule allowed California to ban gas cars. Because 17 states and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s regulations, and because manufacturers understand that California is the largest market for new cars by far, California’s EV mandate will likely be the law of the land if it’s not blocked. Stein said the most effective way to deal with it is an act of Congress. 

“What happens in California doesn't stay in California. If California puts a bunch of mandates that make vehicles more expensive, everybody pays higher prices for those vehicles, not just people in California,” Stein told Just the News. 

The Biden administration never had the authority to ban the sale of gas-powered cars, so it used another mechanism to produce the same result. 

The EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which is also being reviewed, determined that greenhouse gas emissions posed a threat to health and safety and created a framework under the Clean Air Act for the EPA to regulate them, including emissions from vehicles. 

The Biden administration passed two regulations that create the de facto EV mandate. The tailpipe emission standards, which sets limits on emissions from vehicles, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which limits emissions across fleets of vehicles. 

The only way for automakers  to comply with these standards as they are phased in over the next 15 years is with electric vehicles. 

California, however, can and did ban the sale of gas-powered cars. In 2022, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted the Advanced Clean Cars II (ACCII) regulations, which required 100% of new vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission models by 2035.

To adopt emissions requirements independent of the federal government, California needed a waiver. California was granted a waiver for its Advanced Clean Cars. Trump rescinded that waiver, and Biden reinstated it before courts heard arguments for legal challenges to Trump’s canceling of the waiver. 

A group of states led by Ohio, along with fuel industry entities, challenged the reinstatement of the waiver, arguing that it’s unconstitutional. The IER partnered with 23 other groups to file an amicus brief in that case. 

“We think it's unconstitutional that California should have this special dispensation,” Stein said. 

Impact of California’s second waiver

In its last weeks, the Biden administration also granted California its waiver request for the 2022 Advanced Clean Cars II Act. “Today’s actions follow through on EPA’s commitment to partner with states to reduce emissions and act on the threat of climate change,” former EPA administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. 

Automakers will spend one to three years bringing vehicle lines from concept to production, and it can take billions of dollars in capital investment for each product line. With so many states following California’s ban on gas-powered vehicle sales over the next 10 to 15 years, the IER's Stein explained, automakers will be forced to go mostly electric. “It’s the number of states that are following California that really drives automaker decisions,” Stein said. 

If the Trump administration were to revoke the waiver for the ACCII as it did for the earlier regulation, it would again face lengthy legal challenges. Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom set up a $25 million fund for the sole purpose of suing the Trump administration. Stein said legal challenges to the waiver could last a decade before it’s all sorted out. 

Automakers would likely be hesitant to allocate billions of dollars on vehicle lines that could become illegal in 10 years. If the California waiver stands, Stein said, Americans’ options to buy gas-powered vehicles could be very limited. 

“If California is still allowed to mandate or ban internal combustion engine vehicles, the U.S. car market is still going to face the disruptions and increased costs that that Biden EV mandate was trying to impose,” Stein said. 

Congressional Review Act

Stein said that the best way to revoke California’s waiver in a way that can withstand legal challenges is for Congress to pass a Congressional Review Act blocking it. 

The Congressional Review Act has highly limited options for judicial review. So if the House and Senate passed such a measure and the president signed it, which he would almost certainly do, then the waiver would likely be dead, although it is quite possible that eco-activists and the "green energy" lobby may try to delay or derail it in the judicial process.

Should the waiver stand, nearly half of all states will have restrictions on the sales of gas-powered vehicles. Considering that automakers are losing so much money on their EV lines, it’s possible that they’ll ship their profitable models to the states that allow them. This might lead to the situation seen in “dry counties” where people drive long distances to buy alcohol. New car purchases might require a road trip to neighboring states. 

Besides the cost to consumers of these mandates and assault on their choices, Stein said that there’s a principle to be considered in revoking California’s waiver. It’s allowed one state to set highly impactful policies for the rest of the country. 

 “It makes a mockery of the constitutional system,” he said.