California is continuing its efforts to preemptively combat a second Trump administration, given the former president’s intent to reverse many of the state’s environmental policies.
The state’s strategy includes lawsuits designed to reach broad settlements with industries that generate greenhouse gases that would be beyond the reach of the federal government, according to the New York Times.
The state is currently requiring about three-quarters of new trucks sold in the state after 2035 to be zero emissions, and are seeking the Biden administration’s support to ban the sale of new gas-powered passenger vehicles the same year. These policies are tougher than the federal regulations.
“California has imposed the most ridiculous car regulations anywhere in the world, with mandates to move to all electric cars,” Trump has said. “I will terminate that.”
Trump has also targeted Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom over the policy disputes. The former president has called the governor an “environmental maniac” who is “crushing our great automakers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, crushing them under his leadership.”
In his first term, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department frequently battled with California over environmental policies. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump revoked a California Clean Air Act waiver that allowed the state to set its own auto emissions rules that are stricter than the federal levels.
In total, the state was involved in nearly 100 lawsuits against the U.S. during the Trump administration, according to a tracker developed by a Marquette University political scientist.
The first Trump administration effectively laid the groundwork for what could be continued in a second term, specifically with more familiarity with relevant laws, and a presumed more conservative judicial system.
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“The danger, of course, is the Supreme Court,” Mary Nichols, former head of the California Air Resources Board told KQED, “which, in his first term, Trump succeeded in skewing very far to the right and particularly far in the direction of supporting an attack on any type of regulatory activity.”
It took Trump appointees “a long time to figure out how to do as much damage as they wanted to do,” Nichols said, acknowledging that they often won because the federal government hadn’t followed the correct procedures. “They’ve already said they’re going to be much more prepared this time around to move very quickly, to start to dismantle everything they can possibly dismantle. So, it will be hard.”