The federal Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 and amended
in 1977 and 1990, grants one state and one state only, that being California,
the right to formulate vehicular emissions standards stricter than those of the
EPA. That privilege is owing to a distinction California would rather not have,
that of having, in the Los Angeles basin and the San Joaquin Valley, some of
the nation’s dirtiest air. Other states are free to adopt California’s
standards if they wish to, and thirteen—Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, Vermont and Washington, plus the District of Columbia—have done so.
Together, the California-standard bloc accounts for about forty percent of the
US auto market. This segment being far too big for auto manufacturers to ignore,
the California standards have in large part effectively displaced the EPA’s
standards and comprise one of the major factors behind California’s widely recognized
leadership in the battle against global warming.
But that leadership, or at least the legal anomaly
that underpins it, is in danger. The Trump administration not surprisingly
takes a dim view of California’s stricter-than-federal tailpipe emissions
standards. It will come as no great surprise if the EPA under Scott Pruitt
seeks to revoke the exemption that allows California to impose them.
Anyone old enough to have breathed the air in Los Angeles in the 1960s,
or to have tried to make out anything more than a block and a half or so away
through it, and in a position to repeat either exercise today, can attest to
the degree that air quality has improved there over the last 47 years. In fact
air quality over that span has improved significantly nationwide. According to
the Union of Concerned Scientists, levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide
and ground-level ozone—the first two being the main toxins in acid rain, the
third a critical component of smog—have fallen by 71, 46 and 25 percent
respectively since 1980. That group credits the Clean Air Act with preventing
more than 400 thousand premature deaths and hundreds of millions of respiratory
and cardiovascular disease episodes.
The EPA itself notes that over the 45 years following
the passage of the Clean Air Act, national aggregate emissions of six common
pollutants—particles, ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur
dioxide—fell by an average of 70 percent even as the nation’s gross domestic
product more than doubled. We pretty much all breathe cleaner air today, and we
should all of us, of whatever political stripe, be happy about that.
But in keeping with his pervasive amorality and with
long-established Republican tradition, Donald Trump has set out to degrade our
environmental safeguards in the name of jobs. Republicans tend to follow this
course no matter how much the environmental costs outweigh the economic benefits.
It’s also typical of them to champion states’ rights—except when they see fit
not to, which is generally to say, when they’re the ones wielding federal
power. Thus the decision in 2000 by a Supreme Court dominated by Republican
appointees to deny Florida the right to conduct a recount of presidential
ballots. Thus the passage at the behest of President George W. Bush (with
plenty of Democratic support) of a nationwide student-testing regimen under the
No Child Left Behind law. Thus, nowadays, the Trump administration’s policies
on marijuana, sanctuary, abortion and mileage mandates.
There are arguments of varying degrees of cogency to
be made for imposing a uniform nationwide set of mileage standards. Complying
with California’s—the state’s Air Resources Board just voted unanimously to
require new cars to average 54.5 mpg by 2025—will cost automakers money, more
than a thousand dollars per car by some estimates, and those costs will of
course get passed on to consumers. But those transferred costs will be defrayed
if not completely offset by what consumers save on gas.
A more compelling advantage to uniform nationwide mileage standards might be that of sparing
motorists the threat of prosecution in driving across the border from a state
with lower standards to one with higher ones. But there’s also an obvious
reason why California has been granted the right to formulate its own
standards—we have more air pollution than anyone else. Air pollution kills people.
Residents of any state have the right to take reasonable measures to protect their own lives,
and to scale those measures to the local dangers they face. California's air pollution comes largely from car and truck
exhaust. It makes perfect sense that California would want to impose controls
on that exhaust stricter than those in states where smog poses less of a risk.
Fifty years ago, visitors to Hollywood were often
hard-pressed in broad daylight, or daylight as broad as it got, to see that
neighborhood’s iconic namesake sign on the hillside overlooking the movie
studios. These days visibility in Los Angeles is much improved. If Donald Trump
and Scott Pruitt have their way, the Hollywood sign and much of the rest of the
country may be headed back toward smog-blanketed obscurity, and people will
suffer respiratory and cardiovascular ailments in greater numbers than
otherwise, and some of them will die sooner. States’ rights is a matter of
principle. Air quality is a matter of life and death. In the matter of
emissions standards, the Trump administration seems set on violating both of
them. For some of us that violation could prove fatal.
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