EPA set to revoke California's authority to set vehicle standards

Why shouldn't California be able to EXCEED the requirements as established by the EPA? That has been standard operating procedure for a long time. The federal government establishes the floor at the states can exceed that if they are so inclined. This is not a practice limited to the EPA either.

 

I'm guessing minimum wage will be next...

 

Fed set a baseline standard.

Each states must meet that standard but can go above it if they want to.

This basic scheme allow each state (and the industry) to try and test out innovative solution above the baseline. It’s beneficial to both consumer and industry.

A scheme where the fed set a baseline and disallow any state to go above that baseline is an extreme position. Furthermore, going after the industry for working on standard higher than the baseline is also an extreme position. It kill innovation, doesn’t have consumer interest in mind and also handicap the industry.

 

The minimum wage should be regulated at the state, or better yet, the local level. It makes no sense to do that nationwide.

 

Let's just cut California, Oregon and Washington as well as the Northeast and the rest of the country can be one giant conservative utopia full of guns and coal.

 

At some point, scientists believe that there are certain active tectonic fault lines along that region that are likely to accomplish that objective, without the need for any voting or political involvement.

 

Because manufacturers will design and sell cars to the California standard for the entire country rather than endure the complexity of selling one model in CA and another in other states. The result is the people of Alabama, say, paying the extra cost of the high standards without having any say-so in the rulemaking. If it was Maine doing it, no problem, nobody would bother to sell in Maine. But California wags the dog.

Maybe, but minimum wage isn't really the same kind of thing. You can sustain a higher minimum wage in one state without impacting consumers in other states.

Politically, it doesn't seem ideal, but thinking about the case it does sound plausibly like an antitrust problem. Several of the big power players in an industry get together and agree to not compete with each other using a product that undercuts the others on price by polluting more. Whatever the political motivations, the economic argument makes sense to me. Which is also why a regulatory agency willing to use its authority to set high but fair standards is so important -- because it is very difficult to engage in wise collective action with competitors outside of the regulatory process.

 

you buy a car with CVT gearbox and dispose it once reached 70k miles , you can preserve it further by changing transmission oil every 15k but over all , it will add up to pollution one way or another . you buy a car with direct injections with high advertised fuel efficiency that could be sustained for short time before cleaning intake from carbon deposit with some(CRC) cleaner or option for some extensive mechanical work , if we option for diesel engine ,(ad-blue urea ) is a must to clean the engine , all those chemical to break carbon build up are highly toxic water soluble

 

She is spineless

Rocket River

 

I want the next Administration to not only move the standards back . .. but amp them to the MAX
Undoing This current Admin's damage is not enough . . . ..we have to take the knife all the way out so it can start the healing

Rocket River

 

I understand your argument, but I don't understand the legal argument of "well California is big! Therefore, separate rules." It's not California's fault that it is big. It is not Alabama's fault that it is small (well, kind of, thanks to George Wallace, and other not-nice things). But I think the idea is clear enough: A state is a state.

The argument that different rules apply to different sized states seems like an enormous can of worms that could be applied to thousands of different issues.

Anyway, I doubt this goes well for the federal government's case in court. Nearly 50 years is a lot of precedent for this exact issue.

 

I guess I would say this isn't a legal issue (as in, what does the Legislature say) but a rulemaking issue (as in, what does the Commission say). I've worked on regulatory stuff in a different industry with a different commission, but the mechanics are similar. Agency rules are much more bespoke than legislation, which we write in a non-specific way -- a state is a state is a state. But Orders from commissions are much more focused on execution and therefore much more customized to the landscape. And they can target rules to achieve their desired outcomes (usually, the mandate of the agency). So I don't see any problem arising from recognizing that California's rules upset the apple cart for other states and taking action to address that particular problem.

Of course, lawsuits sometimes arise over a lack of clarity in authority to do X or Y, but courts tend to defer to Agencies where their rulemaking authority is established and the process is fair. The courts will weigh in only so far as settle the legal matter of how far does their authority extend, and beyond that it isn't a legal question anymore but subject to the agency parameters.

My guess is the CA's legal challenge will not be against the EPA's authority to assert its supremacy -- after all, CA's authority has been based on a waiver issued by the EPA, as I understand it. It seems likely to me that the EPA has the authority. To challenge the EPA's legal authority to set a maximum for CA also challenges their authority to set a minimum for AL. I think the legal challenge will argue that the process by which they revoke the waiver is capricious, irregular, and therefore unfair. Usually, you have a lot of dialogue with stakeholders, publish draft rules, have a comment period to get feedback from companies, other agencies, citizens, and any other stakeholders, you hold hearings, and then -- years later -- you issue Orders. In this process, the EPA gave California a week's notice and no opportunity to provide input. So CA could win this fight so far as I can tell. But, if the EPA were to run a full and transparent process like they used to do, then they would be allowed to revoke the waiver.

 

Don't forget that this is also the administration who believes that an executive order can abrogate provisions of the 14th amendment.

Nancy do your job.

 

Impeachment is ridiculous at this point and it wouldn't happen anyways. People need to turn out en masse and let their voices be heard at the polls.

 

California is rich and has an enormous economy but in terms of selling cars (population) its a big state but not big enough to dictate how GM makes all its trucks.


Just throwing that in

 

I once studied this in college when I had a different career in mind. This happened to be around when Bush tried to pull the same thing.

California came up with the CAA because they were breaking EPA air standards frequently to the point of being threatened with withholding federal funds. It wasn’t a hippy issue. They were polluting themselves to the point where the fed had to step in.

Fed rarely exerts powers of regulating interstate commerce in these grey debates. When it wanted to make the legal drinking age 21, it didn’t demand states to comply. It declared instead that any state that doesn’t pass laws for the new drinking age won’t receive matching federal funds to maintain freeways.

It’s similar with the EPA. That’s why the debate has ended up on the finer issue of whether Cal adding mpg guidelines influences their clean air thresholds. Taking notes from the previous battle, the trump admin isn’t arguing that they’re taking away California’s (and the other coalition states) right to comply with the EPA’s air quality standards (which typically allows each state to regulate in their own way), it’s that the mpg requirement is an overreach by California.

These moves are a bit capricious by Trump. I don’t think Bush was expecting to win, but Trump winning here will cause a swifter pendulum shift than the slow drip towards mpg efficiency America has seen for the last 4 decades.

 

these iconic Republican lawmakers thought that Calif was big enough.

• then Calif Governor Ronald Reagan, then-POTUS Nixon and then-US Senator from Calif Murphy.

​

They led the way for the passage of the Clean Air Act

while i get that Trump is trying to undo everything Obama had accomplished,
what does he have against the Republicans ?​

The Clean Air Act (CAA) empowers the EPA to regulate air pollution from motor vehicles. To promote uniformity, the law generally bars states from regulating car emissions. But when the Clean Air Act was passed, California was already developing innovative laws and standards to address its unique air pollution problems.

Since the passage of the CAA, car ownership in Calif has more than tripled.

an analogy can be drawn.

Cars and Clean Air are to Californians as Gun rights are to rural America !​

 

Because then you lose your single market of regulatory alignment and create intrastate commerce difficulties. The purpose of political, financial and judicial unions is to work these things out at the federal level.

State laws on swimming pools, house codes are regional and those products are not regularly transferred in from other states. You want to give manufactures a single market of regulations to sell into. You want to give your consumers a simplified marketplace to buy from.

 

Thank you for a valid response and I understand that position and there is some validity to it although it goes against recent history.