EPA allows California to ban gas-powered new car sales by 2035 | Hacker News Reader

EPA allows California to ban gas-powered new car sales by 2035

abcnews.go.com

11 pointsmadihaa6 comments

Does anyone believe this will survive for more than a few months?

No, but it certainly looks great on paper!

No. But I will take a bit of schadenfreude reminding people of all the times they said that something should be "left to the states" because that was the correct unit of decision-making.

Actually, yes? There's a long formal process to go through in granting a waiver, but if a state does get one there are no further triggers or expiration within the waiver period. And there isn't any process to rescind it either afaik. As CARB writes:

>• No waiver has ever been revoked and the one previous denial was quickly reversed. There is no Clean Air Act process for revoking a waiver – which makes sense because governments and industry rely on waivers for years after they are granted to deliver clean vehicles and develop clean air plans. Even waiver denial is incredibly rare. The one time this occurred, in 2008, the U.S. EPA initially denied California’s waiver for GHG emission standards for 2009 and later model year light-duty motor vehicles. That denial was reversed when the U.S. EPA reconsidered it, and ultimately granted it.

>• Waivers do not expire; they are sometimes superseded by a new waiver approving more stringent standards.

Doesn't mean Trump administration won't try, but that in turn doesn't mean they will succeed and they don't have any clear (or even fuzzy) legal basis short of an act of Congress. Which of course itself isn't impossible but would also be non-trivial, the margins are razor tight and other things they want to do and arguments they have made would cut against it.

I could more see a Supreme Court case rather than something within the EPA process. Something like claiming that this was outside the scope of the authority granted to the EPA by Congress, and therefore even though it was granted, it is null and void. And that California is restricting interstate commerce. Something along those lines.

I'm not sure the Supreme Court would agree. (I think they are less supine than many here do.) But I think that would be the angle of attack.

>Something like claiming that this was outside the scope of the authority granted to the EPA by Congress

But that's the thing: it's not. The waiver process is an explicit, black and white textual part of the Clean Air Act [0] including a part explicitly about California [1]. Like, there's no meat on dem legal bones.

FWIW beyond the text there's a bunch of other legal principles and goals/impulses that may end up in conflict. Reliance is going to be a significant issue, cars are not quick design/turnaround products. Everyone who has invested a lot based on the normal legal process is going to be unhappy if the rug gets yanked out from under them and that is legally relevant. As far as goals/impulses, a lot of what Trump Admin/Project 2025/DOGE wants to do involves wholesale dismantling of Federal regulation, departments and standards. But the thing is (as ISPs have been discovering to their chagrin in SCOTUS after their dog-catching-car moment [2]), it's the regulation that means federal supremacy even comes into play at all. If that goes away then authority reverts back to the states to all do whatever they want piecemeal. And at the court level state power itself is a big strain of thought in the last few decades of conservative appointees.

I have no doubt there will be efforts to have their cake and eat it too, but I don't think we're yet so far gone that they'll be able to just rule by fiat, at least not in "the next few months".

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0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/7543

1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/7507

2: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/big-loss-for-isp...

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