The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to block California’s first-in-the-nation regulations that would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles statewide in 2035, setting up a certain legal battle over the future of electric cars in the United States.
By a vote of 50-44, the Republican-led chamber voted to revoke permission that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration had given to California to set the rules.
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“The Biden Administration wanted to use California as a model to slap a radical and unprecedented mandate on our country,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, “cutting down the marketplace of affordable, reliable vehicles that everyday Americans choose to drive.”
Environmental groups, California’s two Democratic senators, and Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the vote. Newsom scheduled a news conference with state Attorney General Rob Bonta for 11 a.m., and state officials have already promised to defend the rules in court.
“We won’t stand by as Trump Republicans make America smoggy again,” Newsom said in a statement, “undoing work that goes back to the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — all while ceding our economic future to China.”
For more than 50 years since President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970, federal law has allowed California, which often has had the nation’s smoggiest skies in Southern California, to set its own tailpipe standards. Those can be stricter than federal standards, and other states are allowed to copy the rules California sets.
Since automakers don’t want to build different models of cars for different states, that has meant California has often set clean air rules for cars and trucks, which other states and then eventually the federal government and the industry implement nationwide.
But there’s a catch: The Clean Air Act says California can only set those stricter standards if it receives permission, called “a waiver” from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Since the 1970s, Republican and Democratic presidents have routinely approved those waivers, and vehicles today are dramatically cleaner than they were a generation ago, with catalytic converters, on-board computer systems and other technology that has cut tailpipe pollution by 95% or more from new cars compared to models from the 1970s and 1980s.
In 2020, saying more action was needed to curb climate change and the wildfires and droughts associated with it, Newsom signed an executive order to prohibit the sale of all new cars and light trucks that run on gasoline starting in 2035.
More than a dozen countries around the world already have similar laws imposing a ban between 2030 and 2040, including England, Germany, France, Mexico, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Israel, China and India.
But Newsom’s move to make California the first U.S. state to take such a step was historic. It was reinforced in 2022 by the California Air Resources Board, and copied by 11 other states: New York, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland.
Auto industry officials have pushed back on the regulations. In December, a month before he left office, former President Biden’s EPA granted California the waiver to approve them. President Trump campaigned on overturning them.
“We will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump said in his inaugural address on Jan. 20. “In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”
Californians buy more electric vehicles than any other state. Last year, 25% of all new car sales in California were electric.
Newsom’s phase-out of gasoline-burning passenger vehicles would not affect the sale of used cars. It would prohibit automakers from selling new cars, SUVs and minivans by 2035 in California. Polls show the measure is controversial.
Last July, 77% of Californian adults described climate change as a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” threat to the state’s economy and environment in a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. But just 39% said they supported the state’s looming ban on new gasoline vehicles by 2035, with 60% opposing it.
The auto industry on Thursday celebrated the Senate vote, which follows a similar vote in the Republican-controlled House three weeks ago. The measure heads now to Trump’s desk.
“The auto industry has invested billions in electrification and has 144 electrified models on the market right now,” said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry group. “The concerns were about the mandate, not the technology. You can be against the mandates — we were — and believe that transportation is trending toward a range of electrified products like battery electric vehicles, hybrids and plug-in hybrids. It is.”
Senate Republican leaders took the rare step Thursday of overruling the Senate parliamentarian, a non-partisan referee who said that the authority senators used, the Congressional Review Act, only applied only to regulations and not EPA waivers.
“This vote is an unprecedented and reckless attack on states’ legal authority to address the pollution causing asthma, lung disease and heart conditions,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “After a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign from Big Oil, Republicans readily jettisoned their long-held view that states can best enact measures that reflect the values and interests of their residents.
“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it,” Bapna said. “But federal lawmakers shouldn’t be intervening to block states from providing cleaner air and a healthier environment.”
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