Republican vote against EV mandate felt like an attack on California

Time of India

7 days ago

There is little question that California leaders already see fossil fuels as a relic of the past.
At the Southern California headquarters of the state's powerful clean-air regulator, the centerpiece art installation depicts in limestone a petrified gas station. Fuel nozzles lie on the ground in decay, evoking an imagined extinction of gas pumps.
For more than a half-century, the federal government has allowed California to set its own stringent pollution limits, a practice that has resulted in more efficient vehicles and the nation's most aggressive push toward electric cars. Many Democratic-led states have adopted California's standards, prompting automakers to move their national fleets in the same direction.
With that unusual power, however, has come resentment from Republican states where the fossil fuel industry still undergirds their present and future. When Republicans in Congress last week revoked the state's authority to set three of its mandates on electric vehicles and trucks, they saw it not just as a policy reversal but as a statement that liberal California should be put in its place.
"We've created a superstate system where California has more rights than other states," Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., who represents rural southwestern Virginia, said in an interview. "My constituents think most folks in California are out of touch with reality. You see this stuff coming out of California and say, 'What?'"
Federal law typically preempts state law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. But in 1967, the federal government allowed smoggy California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency to enact its own clean-air standards that were tougher than federal limits, because the state historically had some of the most polluted air in the nation. Federal law also allows other states to adopt California's standards as their own under certain circumstances.
California has used that authority to build one of the world's most powerful environmental agencies, the
California Air Resources Board
. The board now regulates the airborne emissions released by everything from perfumes to power plants. Products that repeatedly fail to comply with its standards can be barred from sale in the state.
So many consumers live in California or in states such as New York and Pennsylvania that adopt the same standards that manufacturers see little to be gained by making their products in two versions, one to satisfy those states' rules and another for the rest of the country. So, California's requirements often become de facto national standards.
The policy that has drawn the most Republican opposition has been California's mandate to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles starting in 2035.
Republicans, whose party has strong ties to the oil industry, spoke last week about why EVs would be impractical for their constituents.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said on the floor that EVs' limited range made them unsuitable for farmers, ranchers and others in his rural state who must drive long distances each day.
Although California's rules would not bar the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles anywhere else, Barrasso and other Republicans suggested that without the California market, manufacturers would curb their production.
"Every American would lose options -- whether you live in California or not," Barrasso said. "California's EV mandates ban the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks. No more in America. Can you imagine that in Oklahoma or my home state of Wyoming?"
Their arguments also ventured into the ideological realm. In floor arguments and in statements to The New York Times, Republican lawmakers spoke of what the technology -- and California -- represented to the wider populace.
"The American public on Election Day rejected the liberal agenda of California, whether it comes to EVs, whether it comes to open borders, whether it comes to sanctuary cities, a sanctuary state, their efforts to defund police," Barrasso said in his floor speech.
Other Republican lawmakers condemned what they called California's "extreme environmental agenda." Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said in a statement that the "radical liberal state of California" should not be governing for the "hardworking patriots in my district."
Nehls is the House author of the Stop California from Advancing Regulatory Burden Act of 2025. It is otherwise known as the Stop CARB Act, an indication of just how large California's air board -- known by its initials, CARB -- looms in the eyes of Republicans. That bill, which would repeal the section of the Clean Air Act that lets California get waivers to set its own regulations, is pending in the House, as is a similar measure in the Senate.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the smog in Los Angeles was so thick that the giant Hollywood sign often could not be seen from just a few miles away.
Over the years, CARB sharply reduced the state's pollution problem by enacting stringent rules, many of which were eventually adopted nationwide. California's regulatory climate encouraged technical innovations such as the low-emission engine that Honda produced in the 1970s; the three-way catalytic converter with an oxygen sensor that Volvo pioneered later that decade; and Tesla's popularization of EVs.