California has a fallback plan for Trump’s clean car attacks. Does it go far enough?

California regulators, responding to the Trump administration’s attacks on the state’s climate policy, propose to fight back in part by asking lawmakers to backfill electric vehicle incentives, recommending more private investment, and beginning to write clean car rules — again.

“Clean air efforts are under siege, putting the health of every American at risk,” said Air Resources Board chairperson Liane Randolph. “California is continuing to fight back and will not give up on cleaner air and better public health. We have a legal and moral obligation.”

Several state agencies jointly made the recommendations in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s June executive order calling for California to double down on efforts to transition away from fossil fuels.

Proposals unveiled Tuesday also include replacing expiring federal EV tax credits — a tough ask in a tight budget year — and restoring carpool lane access, which would require federal approval. One recommendation seeks to expand vehicle charging access by streamlining utility hookups and simplifying permits for new stations.

The air board is advancing just a few regulatory ideas: one to enact stronger consumer protections for clean car owners, and another to curb diesel pollution from freight hubs such as ports and warehouses. Randolph also said the board would begin work on a new clean cars rule.

A spokesman for the governor said he would review the agencies’ report.

The recommendations reflect the hard shift the state has experienced from a supportive Biden administration toward a hostile one under President Donald Trump, said Guillermo Ortiz, senior clean vehicles advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“When you have your federal government using every tool at its disposal to attack its own state …how are you able to see every attack angle, every vector, everything that this administration is willing to do to harm California?” he said. “That's difficult.”

Other experts also said they expected more. “Folks familiar with this kind of policy will read it and feel...underwhelmed,” wrote Earthjustice lawyer Adrian Martinez in an analysis of the plan.

“Nothing jumps out at me as being particularly aggressive,” said Daniel Sperling, a former Air Resources Board member who is the director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis. “I'm puzzled, actually, because they had acted like they were really going to do something significant.”

Trucking deal collapses

California offered the remedies as a fallback after the Trump Administration announced it would cancel federal waivers issued under the Clean Air Act that have long allowed the state to set more aggressive car and truck standards.

Attacks on the state’s climate policies escalated last week, centered on the Clean Truck Partnership, a voluntary deal between major truck manufacturers and the state that would continue advancing zero emission truck technology even if the waiver programs fell through.

Last week, four manufacturers filed a lawsuit, seeking to dissolve their commitments under the partnership. The Federal Trade Commission, after launching an investigation into California’s program, declared the partnership unenforceable.

Days later, Trump’s Justice Department intervened in two lawsuits, arguing that the decision whether to ban internal-combustion engines in heavy-duty trucks rests ultimately with the federal government.

California’s climate policies matter most in communities near ports, warehouses and railyards, where diesel pollution chokes the air, said Ortiz of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Truck exhaust is a major source of cancer risk and drives respiratory and heart disease.

Without authority to make aggressive rules or strong voluntary measures like the Clean Truck Partnership, experts say the transition to less-polluting trucks could slow down.

A call for bolder action

Experts who called for bolder action said the state has more power than its executive and legislative branches are using.

Sperling said the state could better disincentivize gas-powered cars with a “feebate program,” which could charge fees on high-polluting vehicles in order to pay for clean-car rebates.

“If you really want to put your money where your mouth is, I think really supercharging those programs to advance transportation electrification could be a massively successful strategy,” said Martinez, who directs Earthjustice’s campaign toward that goal.

Martinez said that the state could better structure existing state programs including the Low Carbon Fuel Standard and the state’s Cap and Trade program to pay for electric cars and trucks.

“California shouldn't blink” as the Trump Administration moves “aggressively,” he added.

Ethan Elkind, who directs the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said a statewide rule tightening controls at warehouses and other pollution magnets could achieve similar aims to the truck mandates.

Elkind previously has pushed to go further. If the federal government is getting out of the business of regulating tailpipe emissions and making climate policy, he added, California could fill that vacuum in the future.

“The state could take a pretty aggressive approach here,” he added.

Air Resources Board chair Randolph said that California is not backing down, though she admitted that developing a new clean car rule aimed at phasing out gas-powered cars could take time.

“Because these rulemakings take two, three, sometimes even four years, we decided that it would be good to start that process now, and have it … be ready, ideally for a more receptive U.S. EPA,” Randolph said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.