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.”
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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%.
