The US supreme court agreed on Friday to hear a bid by fuel producers to challenge California’s standards for vehicle emissions and electric cars under a federal air-pollution law in a major case testing the Democrat-governed state’s power to fight greenhouse gases.
The justices took up an appeal by a Valero Energy subsidiary and fuel industry groups over a lower court’s rejection of their challenge to a decision by Joe Biden’s administration to allow California to set its own regulations.
The dispute centers on an exception granted to California in 2022 by the US Environmental Protection Agency to national vehicle emission standards set by the agency under the landmark Clean Air Act anti-pollution law.
The case won’t be argued until the spring, when the Trump administration is certain to take a more industry-friendly approach to the issue. The president-elect, Donald Trump, has vowed to boost production of fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal and repeal key parts of a landmark 2022 climate law.
The high court will not be reviewing the waiver itself, but instead will look at a preliminary issue: whether fuel producers have legal standing to challenge the EPA waiver.
The federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the companies lacked the right to sue because they produced no evidence that they would be affected by the waiver, which directly affects vehicle manufacturers.
Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and other major automakers already are meeting the California emission standards, the administration noted in court papers.
But the fuel producers told the high court that the appellate decision, if left in place, would “imperil future challenges to administrative action”.
They said they met the legal test for getting into court. As a “matter of common sense”, lawyers for the companies wrote, automakers would produce fewer electric vehicles and more gas-powered cars if the waiver were set aside, directly affecting how much fuel would be sold.
The EPA waiver was part of the Biden administration’s efforts to reverse environmental rollbacks from Trump’s first White House term and restore California’s authority to set tighter emissions rules.
California has unique authority under the federal Clean Air Act to set tougher standards for cars sold in the nation’s largest state, which has prompted automakers to produce more fuel-efficient passenger vehicles that emit less climate-damaging tailpipe exhaust.
Though states and municipalities are generally pre-empted from enacting their own limits, Congress allowed the EPA to waive the pre-emption rule to allow California to set certain regulations that are stricter than federal standards.
California, the most-populous US state, has received more than 75 waivers since 1967, requiring increasingly better emissions performance and EV sales.
In April, the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit rejected the fuel producers’ case as well as a related challenge from Ohio and other Republican-led states and fuel producers. The appeals court hears many challenges to federal regulations.
The supreme court did not act on the states’ appeal.
The current fight has its roots in a 2019 decision by the Trump administration to rescind the state’s authority. Three years later, with Biden in office, the EPA restored the state’s authority.
Valero’s Diamond Alternative Energy and related groups challenged the reinstatement of California’s waiver, arguing that the decision exceeded the EPA’s power under the Clean Air Act and inflicted harm on their bottom line by lowering demand for liquid fuels.
The US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit threw out the lawsuits in April, finding that Valero and the states lacked the necessary legal standing to bring their claims.
Other environmental regulations have not fared well before the conservative-majority court in recent years. In 2022, the justices limited the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants with a landmark decision. In June, the court halted the agency’s air-pollution-fighting “good neighbor” rule.
Another ruling in June, overturning a decades-old decision known colloquially as Chevron, is also expected to make environmental regulations more difficult to set and keep, along with other federal agency actions.
But the justices also have recently kept in effect environmental regulations to limit planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, while legal challenges play out.
