The Senate is currently considering blocking provisions allotted under California’s emission waivers that allow the state to set its own automotive regulations. But California is no longer just requiring higher levels of efficiency, it now has plans to effectively ban the sale of all new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. The House recently decided to vote to block that initiative during an uncharacteristically bipartisan legislative moment.
Senate leadership now plans on spending the next several weeks mulling the issue over before putting it to a vote. However, the conversation already seems to be devolving into who actually has parliamentarian authority to make such decisions — instead of the discussion focusing on how the proposed legislation would impact the United States.
We’re not going to bore you with the minutia of how that works. But it primarily boils down to arguments about whether the Congressional Review Act even permits legislators to roll back the Californian initiatives pertaining to what kind of vehicles can be sold there. These things are mostly litigious word games designed to determine which entities have the most power. However, their outcomes can and do set precedents that can have unintended legal consequences further down the line.
The other side of the debate is whether or not California should have the ability to make rules that ultimately impact the rest of the country.
Since 1967, California has held unique provisions under the Clean Air Act that allows it to set more stringent emission regulations than the national standard. This is why you’d occasionally hear of older vehicles being dubbed “California Cars” and why select models sold in the state today aren’t available anywhere else in the country.
Due to the population and economic relevance of California, many have argued that rules established by the California Air Resources Board have effectively dictated national U.S. emission policy for decades. The issue came to a head in 2008, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revoked the waiver on the grounds that greenhouse gas emissions were not limited to the region and should thereby be a federal issue. However, the waivers were reinstated by 2009 after legal challenges were raised by the state.
The issue was revisited during the first Trump administration in 2019. Donald Trump had asserted that Americans were getting overly complex vehicles due to overbearing government regulations. He directed the EPA to soften emissions laws and then blamed California’s waivers for further encouraging the automotive industry to chase emissions tech at the expense of affordable vehicles using traditional powertrains.
Those following the news at that time will likely recall how the issue swiftly devolved into a political quagmire. California immediately rallied together a dozen like-minded states and launched numerous lawsuits. Meanwhile, the Trump administration held hearings on the matter while almost completely ignoring federal emissions rules that had likewise encouraged modern vehicles to grow in complexity, cost, and overall size.
Automakers responded by publicly announcing whether or not they would adhere to the California emission rules, should there be a national emissions rollback. However, no such rollback occurred and the Golden State continued issuing its own emission rules.
While the topic never really came up during the Biden administration, Trump has maintained that modern vehicle designs aren’t what the average American buyer wants and has continued to suggest that deregulating the market is the best solution. Some have alleged that he’s softened on the matter after giving Tesla CEO Elon Musk access to cabinet meetings. However, Musk has likewise come out against prolonged EV subsidies and claims to support the deregulation of the automotive sector. This is presumably because Tesla got an early lead on legacy automakers, which now stand to gain the most from those expanded incentives.
Despite being much quieter this time around, Republicans are again trying to revoke the California waivers. The reasoning is familiar and revolves around claims of the state’s influence steering the automotive industry into building vehicles that may not be popular in the heartland.
At this stage, it’s inarguable to claim that California doesn’t play a role in what kinds of models get built. Numerous automakers have said as much and/or vowed to adhere to West Coast rules in the past. However, all-electric vehicles aren’t seeing the kinds of adoption rates automakers and emissions-focused legislators had hoped for. There are likewise mounting criticisms that EVs aren’t nearly as environmentally friendly as advertised due to their intentional lack of user repairability and extensive use of volatile raw materials for battery construction.
Sadly, the matter seems to have fallen back into the usual political schism of right vs left. As previously mentioned, the House of Representatives has already voted to undo several federal waivers that let California extra-strict emission requirements. The big ones pertained to rules applied to the trucking industry and the blanket EV sales requirement scheduled to take effect in 2035.
That leaves the Senate to deliberate until those issues can come to a vote. However, there’s already been pushback within the federal government alleging that Congress doesn’t have the authority. If we go back to the Articles of Confederation, states were originally intended to have significant leeway in terms of governing their own commerce and trade whereas Congress was supposed to lack those powers. This gradually gave way toward Congress having significant influence in matters of regulation, which indirectly impacts trade and commerce.
However, the current situation has California doing its own thing while it directs a dozen other states to follow suit. Despite presidential executive orders exploding in popularity during the 20th century, the White House wasn’t supposed to make any decrees that would directly impact matters of trade. But things have been different in practice, with the Biden administration aggressively incentivizing the automotive sector to embrace electrification after Trump’s team used executive orders to steer America away from the EV trend.
Automakers, which have publicly taken every conceivable side on the issue over the years, are currently back to lobbying against the California waivers via the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. Their assertion is that EVs simply aren’t selling as well as the industry initially assumed. John Bozzella, the trade group’s president, even suggested that it would “take a miracle” for the automotive sector to adhere to the Californian requirements.
Of course, environmental groups have come out to suggest the opposite. Organizations like the Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Clean Vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council have suggested that the metrics aren’t only achievable but also essential for the health of the planet. Most are still pushing heavily for the normalization of all-electric vehicles, though the ecological concerns around battery powered cars are becoming more broadly known — encouraging more entities to push for expanded public transportation and car-free zones in urban areas.
Rather than seeking compromises or seriously exploring the ramifications of taking either path, the whole matter seems tragically locked into partisan politics. Republicans are pushing to strip California of its massive influence, while broadly ignoring other regulatory factors or industry decisions that may be making today’s automobiles less desirable to the public. Many Democrats are insisting California retain the waivers as the U.S. pivots toward “greener” vehicles, completely ignoring the ecological concerns posed by EVs or the potential economic fallout of mandating their increased production.
Congress is supposed to reach a final decision and hold a vote on the ultimate status of the California waivers before June 2nd. Odds presently appear decent that they’ll vote to remove them, too. But it seems unlikely that the state won’t launch a slew of lawsuits to try and reverse the outcome. It also seems more plausible that the true fate of tomorrow’s cars rests more in the hands of manufacturers and consumers. Buyers have been pushing back against the current automotive trends and builders are either going to have to adapt or get comfortable with far fewer sales in the years ahead. That probably doesn’t mean abandoning EV production entirely. But we’ve already seen most brands walk back their planned all-electric product offenses as sales have been underwhelming.
[Images: Michael Vi/Shutterstock; Chiociolla/Shutterstock; Hairem/Shutterstock]
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