In the face of numerous challenges, including legal battles and resistance from Republican states, the Biden Administration has begun largely outsourcing its “green energy” policy decisions to an unelected group of bureaucrats in the heavily Democratic state of California.
According to the Daily Caller, requests made of Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are prioritized when they come from the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which often requests that the federal apparatus enact rules that go even further than most current federal regulations. The EPA has granted numerous waiver requests to CARB since Joe Biden first took office, with many of these waivers giving CARB the power to dictate rules to other states.
“EPA-granted waivers enable CARB to effectively dictate motor vehicle, trucking, and rail transport policies for the rest of the country,” said Marlo Lewis Jr., senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“It is more obvious that EPA lacks Clean Air Act authority to explicitly ban sales of combustion engine vehicles than to demonstrate that CARB lacks such authority,” Lewis explained. The delegation of tasks to the California body is done because of the fact that “the Biden Administration would incur much greater political blowback if it tried to adopt an express zero emission vehicle mandate.”
As such, the EPA has repeatedly granted Clean Air Act waivers to California if the state pledges to implement rules that are even stricter than current federal rules.
“EPA follows the prescribed process in the Clean Air Act regarding any California waiver decisions,” an EPA spokesman said in a statement. “In this waiver review process, EPA issues a public comment period, EPA reviews the comments, and the Administrator determines whether the requirements for obtaining an authorization have been met.”
“For more than 50 years, the Clean Air Act has allowed California to seek a federal government waiver in order to enforce its own motor vehicle standards,” said a CARB spokesman in a statement. “In enacting this law, Congress recognized that California experienced significant air pollution problems and had been regulating vehicle emissions at a time when the federal government had not yet adopted comparable standards. This law is well-established and has been highly effective.”
California has repeatedly gone further than any other state in implementing “green energy” regulations such as carbon emissions rules and restrictions on pre-existing forms of energy. Although the Trump Administration blocked the far-left state from doing so, the Biden Administration has given the state free reign to do whatever it pleases with regards to energy regulations. Among many other radical proposals, CARB has implemented an “Advanced Clean Cars II” policy, which demands that 100% of new passenger vehicles sold in California must be zero-emissions models by the year 2035.
Thus far, 17 other states have followed California’s guidance, either voluntarily or involuntarily, with regards to auto emissions. Recently, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) announced that the state would no longer follow California’s orders under the Advanced Clean Cars II mandate.