The US Supreme Court today rejected a bid by Ohio and other states to stop California from implementing its own clean air rules, a legal right that California has had since the 60s which Donald Trump has repeatedly tried and failed to remove.

Ever since the 1960s, California has been able to set its own clean air rules, as long as they are at least as strict as federal clean air rules. California was granted this waiver in the Clean Air Act as recognition of its unique air quality challenges.

When the link between gasoline-burning vehicles and smog was discovered, California was building its own clean air rules at the same time as the federal government was.

At the time (and still), Los Angeles was choked with smog. The city is built around car transportation (after public transit in the city was destroyed by literal cartoon villians), has unique geography which traps smog above most of its population, and is also currently home to the largest container ports in America, through which ~40% of the country’s containerized traffic now comes.

The central valley of California is also home to a lot of smog – with the most agriculturally productive land in the country producing half of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables. But it’s surrounded by mountains, and smog has nowhere to go.

Since the federal government didn’t want to pre-empt efforts that were already underway in California (under then-Governor Ronald Reagan), and acknowledging that California’s challenges were unique, it allowed the EPA to review California’s rules and grant it a waiver to run under its own clean air regulations as long as they are at least as good as the EPA’s.

Other states are allowed to follow these rules, but only if they copy them exactly. These are known as “section 177 states,” named after the section of the Clean Air Act that grants this waiver, or “CARB” states, named for the California Air Resources Board which creates the state’s regulations.

So for the last 60 years, California has mostly run under its own clean air rules. There was a brief period during the Obama administration where California and federal rules were harmonized – but industry lobbying and the meddling of an ignorant reality TV host resulted in a shattering of that harmony, giving companies a more difficult regulatory environment.

These clean air rules have been a success, resulting in a >98% reduction in vehicle-based pollutants in the LA area, even as total vehicle miles traveled have gone up (and that news was from 2012 – it’s gotten even better since then due to EVs).

However, there’s still more work to be done, as LA and the nearby Inland Empire still have quite dirty air.

And so, California released a new set of clean air rules in 2022, which the EPA is expected to approve this week.

But other states immediately challenged those rules, despite that the rules do not affect them.

The challenge was brought by Ohio and 16 other republican-led states who sought to end the California’s long-supported state’s right to protect its residents from dirty air.

The states argued that the Constitution doesn’t allow the government to treat states unequally (despite that all of the states bringing the lawsuit have more Congressional representation per capita than California does), so letting California set clean air rules is unfair. The states seem to think that Californians should be required to breathe just as much poison as their republican leadership is forcing onto their citizens.

The case has already made its way through the court system, with courts reasonably ruling that the law, which has been effective for 60 years at reducing pollution and health costs for Californians and other CARB states, should stand. In April, the DC court of appeals affirmed California’s right.

But that wasn’t enough for Ohio and the 16 republican states, who brought their desire to poison Californians all the way so the Supreme Court of the United States.

That Court today denied the states’ petition, thus affirming the DC Court’s decision will stand. 8 of the 9 individuals sitting on the Court agreed not to review the case and to let the lower court’s decision stand, though Clarence Thomas stated that he would have taken the case.

In addition, last Friday, while the Court did agree to hear a case involving an oil industry challenge to California’s clean air rules, that case is narrowly limited to the issue of standing, or deciding what entities are allowed to bring cases to court. When it accepted that petition, the Court said it will not consider review of California’s right to set its own emissions standards.

Electrek’s Take

Well, I’ll take this as my opportunity to eat a little bit of crow. Even as late as last week, I thought there was a good chance the Court would torture itself into some sort of extra-legal reasoning to try to stop California’s rules, as it has before on CO2 emissions and Chevron deference.

But on Friday and today, the Court denied review of not one but two separate cases in that respect, so it seems like it either doesn’t want to hear cases about California’s well-established legal authority – or perhaps that it’s just waiting until the time is right to strike. We’ll have to see which one it is – I still don’t trust them given their explicit corruption, but we can take a breath for now.

All of this happens just over a month before convicted felon Donald Trump, who finally received more votes than his opponent on his third attempt (despite committing treason in 2021, for which there is a clear legal remedy), will once again find himself squatting in the White House. Mr. Trump has stated repeatedly that he wants to reverse clean air policies, thus saddling Americans with dirtier air, higher costs and poorer health, and to destroy the US EV market and send US manufacturing jobs to China.

And one of his common targets has been California, the state that has done the most in favor of advancing clean air – which is obviously anathema to a dirty air advocate like himself. He has signaled that he wants to “rip up” California’s waiver, an effort which he tried and failed to do before. So expect a fight to come in the coming years, with California once again on the side of clean air, and Mr. Trump once again on the side of poisoning Americans.

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