Az Republicans sue EPA, California over rules requiring electric vehicle transition

Arizona Republican leaders on
Wednesday filed a pair of lawsuits against the Environmental Protection
Agency’s new tailpipe pollution standards for cars and heavy-duty
trucks, a day after they joined a multistate legal challenge to a
California regulation mandating the use of electric semi trucks.

House Speaker Ben Toma and Senate
President Warren Petersen, both Republicans, partnered with the Arizona
Trucking Association to file the lawsuits against the EPA in the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The challenges to the Clean Car standards and the Clean Truck standards that the EPA approved in March both claim
that the rules go beyond the agency’s legal authority and are
“arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise not in
accordance with law.”

The Arizona Legislature is
represented by St. Louis attorneys Justin D. Smith and Dean John Sauer.
Both are veteran Republican operatives who worked for U.S. Sen. Eric
Schmitt when he was Missouri’s attorney general.

Legislative rules allow the speaker
and the president to launch litigation or join existing legal challenges
without receiving approval from their chambers. 

“In the absence of our Attorney General holding the Biden Administration accountable, the Legislature will gladly protect our citizens from this egregious abuse of power,” Petersen said in a written statement.

“The EPA’s tailpipe emissions rules
prioritize politics over science, posing a greater threat to public
health by inflating the cost of essential and everyday goods,” Arizona
Trucking Association President and CEO Tony Bradley said in a statement.

The filings announced on Wednesday
are petitions for review that do not contain any legal arguments about
why Petersen and Toma think the EPA’s new standards should be struck
down by the courts.

However, the pair outlined their concerns with the emissions rules in June 2023 when they submitted public comments urging the EPA to reject both proposals it was considering.

“EPA’s proposed rule for heavy-duty
vehicles will cost jobs, increase the price of goods, hurt families,
threaten our electric grid’s reliability, and endanger our national
security,” Petersen and Toma wrote in their public comment on the heavy-duty truck rules.

Both rules, the Republicans wrote, go
beyond the authority Congress has granted the EPA and seek to
“transform the automotive industry through rulemaking.” Additionally,
there wasn’t a cost-benefit analysis done, there’s no modeling of
climate change impacts the EPA said justified the rules, the EPA used
“erroneous assumptions” about vehicle costs, they use faulty estimates
about eclectic grid reliability and they will force American dependence
on China for essential materials to create electric vehicles.

The challenges to the new EPA vehicle pollution rules come a day after Nebraska spearheaded a multistate challenge
against the heavy-duty truck regulations. Nebraska was joined by the
attorneys general in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa,
Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah,
West Virginia and Wyoming. 

Arizona joined those states, and the Nebraska Trucking Association, in the Nebraska-led effort to sue California and the California Air Resources Board, which has set rules for zero-emission vehicle requirements,
including requiring trucking operators to buy electric trucks. The rule
will apply to any fleets that operate in California, even if they are
headquartered in other states.

The California rule, which took
effect this year, also regulates sales of trucks in the state, ranging
in size from delivery vans to big rigs. By 2035, 55% of delivery vans
and small trucks, 75% of buses and larger trucks, and 40% of
tractor-trailers and other big rigs sold in the state would have to be
all-electric.

This isn’t the first time in 2024
that Petersen and Toma have sued the EPA: In March, the GOP leaders
joined the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry filed a lawsuit challenging the agency’s decision to cut annual air pollution standards by 25%.