WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday opened the door to a possible challenge to California's longstanding authority to set stricter emissions limits for new vehicles, including its 2035 “zero emissions” target.
The justices voted to hear an appeal from oil and biofuel producers who had sued the Environmental Protection Agency, saying it had given California too much power to regulate motor vehicles in the name of fighting climate change.
The lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the oil producers had no standing to sue. Their only claim for compensation was that they might sell less oil and gas in the future. However, the justices voted to reconsider the existing matter and decide whether the lawsuit should be allowed to proceed.
Ultimately, it's about California's longstanding authority to set stricter emissions limits for new cars, trucks and buses.
The court will examine the case – Diamond Alternative Energy vs. EPA – Early next year, after Donald Trump is sworn in.
His administration will decide whether California can enforce tough regulations over the next decade. The state would need Trump's EPA to issue a new exemption in 2025 that would allow California to go beyond federal standards for tailpipe emissions.
The California exemption has a long history in environmental law.
Since the late 1960s, Congress has required states to meet federal auto emissions standards, but he also said California might get a waiver to go further. Under this provision of the Clean Air Act, the EPA can allow California to adopt its own stricter emissions standards due to the nation's worst air pollution.
The law says California can set stricter standards because it has a compelling and unique air pollution problem. But oil industry lawyers argued that greenhouse gases are a global problem, not a California problem.
“The EPA granted waivers to California to address local problems like smog in the Los Angeles Basin, where pollution was both created and felt by Californians.” said the fuel manufacturers in their appeal. “But all reason ceased in 2009 when California began claiming that (the waivers) authorized it to set standards to curb greenhouse gases to combat global climate change.”
The law says an exemption could be granted to “meet compelling and exceptional conditions,” but oil producers argued that “the global climate is not the type of California-specific condition” that warrants a special exemption for the state.
“The EPA believes California is the only state that can regulate the nation’s automotive market to combat climate change and advance the transition to electric vehicles,” the fuel makers said.
The appeal was authored by Jeffrey Wall, the acting attorney general in the final year of the first Trump administration, and Morgan Ratner, a former law clerk for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Their arguments failed in the lower courts. In April the The D.C. Circuit Court dismissed her lawsuit in a 3-0 decision, saying fuel producers don't have the authority to sue the EPA just because they might sell less fuel in California in the future.
The automakers have not sued to challenge California's standards. Instead, Honda, Ford, Volvo, BMW and other major automakers “entered into independent agreements with California” to comply with emissions standards, the EPA told the court.
In a separate appeal, Ohio and 16 other Republican-led states argued that California's exemption was unconstitutional. They cited a 2013 opinion from Roberts that rejected part of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that its tighter controls on Alabama and other states with a history of discrimination violated the state's right to “equal sovereignty.”
However, the court did not accept this appeal.
For the record:
6:05 p.m., December 15, 2024An earlier version of this article said the Supreme Court had responded to the appeal from Ohio and other Republican-led states. The court did not hear the appeal.
In defense of its emissions rules, California officials said the emissions standards were needed both to combat unhealthy air pollution and to limit the greenhouse gases that are altering the climate. The California Air Resources Board said that the “transportation sector is responsible for more than half of California's total carbon pollution, 80 percent of its smog-forming pollution and 95 percent of its toxic diesel emissions.”
The EPA agreed. It said California has unhealthy levels of air pollution and is “particularly affected by climate change, including increasing risks from record-breaking fires, heat waves, storm surges, sea level rise, water supply shortages and extreme heat.”