CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey’s office has joined a lawsuit along with 16 other state AGs challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to give California exemption to the Clean Air Act.
The exemption would allow California to impose its Advanced Clean Cars program on all new motor vehicles. The Clean Air Act preempts all other states’ emission standards for new vehicles unless they adopt standards identical to California’s.
The petition was filed May 12 in U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
In the petition, the AGs say this special treatment violates the Constitution, which creates a federalist framework in which all states are equal.
“The act simply leaves California with a slice of its sovereign authority that Congress withdraws from every other state,” Morrisey said. “The EPA cannot selectively waive the act’s preemption for California alone because that favoritism violates the states’ equal sovereignty.”
The Clean Air Act allows California to set emission standards that are tougher than those adopted by the federal government. In 2013, the EPA issued a preemption waiver for California’s Advanced Clean Cars program, which contained multiple subprograms. One is the Zero Emissions Vehicle program, which, among other things, regulates the percentage of each manufacturer’s new sales that must be zero-emissions vehicles. Another is the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards program, which sets fleetwide standards for the emission of greenhouse gasses.
The EPA withdrew the waiver for those two programs in 2019, and California challenged that withdrawal. Several states, including West Virginia, intervened to defend the EPA’s withdrawal. That challenge has remained in the D.C. Circuit Court pending the current administration’s decision about restoring the waiver.
The new lawsuit is challenging the 2022 restoration of California’s waiver.
Morrisey joined the Ohio-led lawsuit with attorneys general in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.