[NYTr] Calif Wins Legal Battle to Make Cars Cleaner; Court Rejects Auto Industry "Greencar"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

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Wired blog - Dec 12, 2007
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/california-wins.html

California Wins Legal Battle to Make Cars Cleaner

By Brandon Keim 

Greencar -- The automobile industry's challenge to California's Clean
Car law -- was rejected by a federal court today.

Passed in 2002, the law requires new cars sold in California to emit 30
percent fewer greenhouse gases by 2020. In order for it to take effect,
the Environmental Protection Agency needs to grant a waiver formally
permitting the state to apply standards more rigorous than those
contained in the federal Clean Air Act.

The EPA has so far delayed the waiver, even though it's granted similar
waivers to other California pollution standards. Automobile makers have
also claimed that the law was invalid because it invoked the Clean Air
Act rather than federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. That
was the argument rejected in today's Central Valley Chrysler-Jeep v.
Witherspoon decision.

The upshot to all this legalistic jockeying: if the automakers had won,
the EPA could have used the decision as justification for denying a
waiver. But by deciding against the automakers and writing that climate
science makes the EPA's position "the very definition of folly," the
agency will be pressed to let California clean up its cars.

If the EPA refuses to grant the waiver, California will be able to point
to this case -- and another federal decision in Vermont, not to mention
a Supreme Court decision -- in its pending lawsuit and accuse the EPA of
obeying politics, not law.

And as California goes, so goes the nation: 16 other states are pushing
ahead of the federal government in demanding improved efficiency and
less pollution in their cars.

"Automakers have the ability to innovate, and we know global warming is
real and its dangers imminent. The public wants cleaner cars, but
automakers keep resisting state laws," said Jennifer Witherspoon, a
communications director for green law nonprofit Environmental Defense.
"They just keep going back to the courts. But they lost in Vermont, they
lost in the Supreme Court and now they lost in California. The law is on
our side."

See: Federal Court Rebukes Auto Industry Challenge to Clean Car Program
as "the Very Definition of Folly" [Press Release] here:
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/pressrelease.cfm?contentID=7444

See also: 
Governor Arnie to EPA: Hasta La Vista, Bureaucratic Delay Monkeys
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/governor-arnie-.html