By Tyler Barker

May 17, 2022 - West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has joined a lawsuit along with his counterparts in 16 states challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s choice to allow California to exercise extraordinary authority under 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.

In the lawsuit, the attorneys general argue this special treatment violates the Constitution, which creates a federalist framework in which all states are equal and none is more equal than others – and the Clean Air Act disregards that design.

“The Act simply leaves California with a slice of its sovereign authority that Congress withdraws from every other state,” Attorney General 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 more stringent than those adopted by the federal government. The EPA in 2013 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.

Attorney General 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.

Read the lawsuit at: https://bit.ly/3MbDoIR.