EPA grants California CO2 emissions waiver

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After a five-year legal battle, the Environmental Protection Agency yesterday granted California permission to set the nation’s first greenhouse-gas emissions standards for cars. This paves the way for as many as 15 other states that have endorsed California’s proposal to follow suit.

The state’s victory is mostly symbolic at this point, because it already agreed to follow new federal regulations through 2015. But it provides a final resolution to years of legal wrangling over CO2 limits on tailpipe emissions.

Since cars emit carbon dioxide in direct proportion to their fuel consumption, the issue had been mired in dozens of lawsuits and countersuits among automakers, the various states, the EPA, and non-profit environmental organizations over whether the rule was an emissions or a fuel economy regulation, whether it was practical, and who had the right to enforce it. This action ends the long saga.

Under the 1968 Clean Air Act, California is allowed to set its tougher emissions standards than the rest of the country, but it can’t set fuel economy standards. Other states are allowed to sign on to the California standard or the national standard, but only with the permission, or “waiver” from the EPA. So 15 other states, including Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Arizona, which had signed on to the California standard were waiting for the ruling.

In May, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson put the issue to rest by passing the first national carbon dioxide emissions standard for cars, modeled after the California standard. The national CO2 limits would effectively require cars to average 35.5 mpg by 2015. In return, California agreed not to pass its own rules until after 2015.

This new ruling will allow California to again take the environmental lead after 2016.

The state’s original standards, which started the flurry of lawsuits, calls for CO2 limits that would require cars to average almost 40 mpg by 2020.

—Eric Evarts

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