Senate votes to revoke California’s ability to set air pollution standards

Senate Republicans have voted 51 to 44 to overturn a waiver that allowed California to set stricter air air pollution requirements for automobiles. The state has obtained waivers more than 100 times since federal legal guidelines granted the correct some 50 years in the past.

Sixteen different states and the District of Columbia follow California’s emissions requirements, and most of them have applied fossil gas automobile phase-outs. Different Senate votes at this time repealed waivers that allowed California to set stricter emissions requirements for medium- and heavy-duty automobiles.

California’s EV mandate is definitely a zero-emissions commonplace. Starting in 2026, the state was to start requiring elevated gross sales of zero-emissions vehicles and passenger vans till 2035, when automakers must promote solely zero-emissions automobiles. 

Presently, two applied sciences qualify: hydrogen gas cells and battery electrical automobiles. Given the growing pains that gas cells and hydrogen filling networks have skilled, EVs shortly turned the de facto method to assembly California’s 2035 deadline.

Final yr, 25.3% of new light-duty vehicles in California certified as zero emissions, and practically all of them have been EVs. The state’s mandate required 35% of latest gross sales to be ZEV in 2026, one thing automakers have said could be “inconceivable.” 

ZEV gross sales development in California was flat in 2024, although earlier years have been totally different, with share rising from 7.8% in 2020 to 25% in 2023.

The vote Thursday bucked priority by going in opposition to the recommendation of the Senate parliamentarian and the Authorities Accountability Workplace, which each had dominated that the waiver couldn’t be revoked underneath the Congressional Assessment Act. The CRA permits a easy majority vote on a decision to overturn a regulation, permitting a Senate vote to proceed with out menace of filibuster.

Beforehand, California’s lawyer basic Rob Bonta was “ready for” Republican efforts to repeal the emissions waiver through the CRA. “We don’t assume it’s an acceptable use of the Congressional Assessment Act, and we’re ready to defend ourselves if it’s wrongfully weaponized,” he advised Politico in early March.