A New CRA Opportunity on EVs
New Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin recently sent a waiver granted to California for its Advanced Clean Cars II regulations (ACCII) to Congress for review under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). This important step will allow Congress to roll back the harmful mandate that reduces choice and increases costs in more than a dozen states across the country.
The California Waiver
California’s waiver was granted under the Biden-Harris EPA to continue and expand the state’s Advanced Clean Cars Program. The ACCII includes a series of stringent regulations that increase the number of low- and zero-emission vehicles and mandate emission levels on new passenger vehicles sold in California reach zero by 2035.
California’s regulations mandate that manufacturers sell increasing quantities of passenger vehicles classified as “zero emission” until 2035. At that point, all new cars sold in California must be zero-emission vehicles. Vehicles classified as having zero emissions include fully electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
Gas powered cars and traditional hybrid vehicles do not meet California’s stringent standards and would be banned from being sold in California markets. The California new vehicle market makes up 11.6% of all new vehicle registrations in the United States. Thus, these harsh requirements would have a significant impact on the way car manufactures and dealerships do business nationwide.
Under the waiver, Californians would no longer have the freedom to purchase traditional or hybrid gas vehicles. Beyond limiting consumers’ choice, this poses problems in areas with insufficient infrastructure to support large numbers of electric vehicles. The ACCII mandate for passenger vehicles also increases the cost of transportation for Californians as they become dependent on EVs at a time when electricity prices are high and EVs are largely more expensive than traditional automotives.
The California Carveout
Under the Clean Air Act, California has a special carveout enabling the state to apply for and be granted special waivers. Unlike the other 49 states, California can receive waivers to enact its own environmental standards provided that: (1) those standards are at least as strong as the federal requirements, (2) are not arbitrary, and (3) that California can demonstrate a need for them.
If watching Californians suffer under an EV mandate was not bad enough, the ACCII waiver has a snowball effect. In this case, the ACCII waiver permits California to enact its own stringent regulations on vehicle emissions and opens the door for other states to adopt those standards without a separate application process.
California Setting the Standard
To date, 12 states and DC have adopted California’s ACCII standards and agreed to abide by California’s mandate for zero-emission vehicles by 2035. Together, those states make up 30.6 % of the new vehicle registrations in the United States.
However, many of these states did not vote to adopt these standards through the legislative process. Instead, executive actions and regulatory councils adopted them independently of state representatives. In the case of New York, the Climate Action Council developed the Scoping Plan based on California’s waiver to enact the same standards in New York State. This plan was then implemented by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as a rule across the state.
With nearly a third of the U.S. market impacted, the ACCII waiver given to California imposes a significant burden on Americans across the nation.
Congress Can Reverse Pro-EV Overregulation
Administrator Zeldin’s recent submission of the ACCII waiver to Congress as a rule opens the door to remove this burden through the Congressional Review Act. If Congress votes to overturn the rule, this would effectively stop allowing California’s EV mandate to dictate what other states do.
Removing this waiver through the CRA process would ensure that a waiver or rule that is substantially the same cannot appear again. It also removes the foundation for not only California’s EV mandate, but also other states’ mandates as well. Overturning this rule forces states who have enacted EV requirements contingent upon California’s waiver to rescind those and return to the federal guidance on emissions.
As House Majority Leader Scalise highlighted in his CRA Targets List, this rule “has resulted in higher vehicle prices for consumers, increased costs and manufacturing complexities for automakers, and a more complicated regulatory environment.”
Congress should take advantage of this opportunity to remove the ACCII waiver through the CRA process, working with the Trump Administration to overturn one of the most harmful regulations from the Biden-Harris Administration. This legislative action would certainly reinstate regulatory common sense over California’s supercharged environmental agenda.
