Legislation that would overturn waivers granted by the Environmental Protection Agency to California for its multi-faceted clean vehicle push impacting trucking was signed by President Donald Trump Thursday, and the state immediately followed with its promised lawsuit over the action.
At issue is the question of whether a waiver is a rule as defined by the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Rules are subject to being overturned by Congress under the CRA. But the generally accepted legal definition for waivers is that they do not come under the CRA. As Roll Call reported, Congress has never overturned a waiver by using the CRA.
The EPA grants waivers to California under provisions of the 1970 Clean Air Act when the state seeks environmental standards stricter than federal rules.
The key California waivers targeted by Congress in its most recent action are the Advanced Clean Trucks rule (ACT) and the Omnibus NOx rule. The Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule had sought a waiver. But just days before Donald Trump took office, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) yanked the waiver request and the ACF is effectively dead.
In a prepared statement, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state had filed suit against the CRA action. He and California Attorney General Rob Bonta had threatened that action after the legislation passed both houses of Congress.
Multiple states join with California on lawsuit
The suit was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Several other states that have committed to aligning with California’s zero emission vehicle (ZEV) rules are also plaintiffs in the suit: Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
The legislation “defies decades of precedent of these waivers not being subject to the CRA, and contradicts the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Senate Parliamentarian, who both ruled that the CRA’s short-circuited process does not apply to the waivers,” Newsom said in a prepared statement.
Both the GAO and the Senate Parliamentarian had released opinions that they did not believe the CRA could overturn a waiver as opposed to a rule.
The presence of other states as plaintiffs is why the issue has become of interest to Congress. The market share of California plus its “follower” states would effectively mean that OEMs, who want to avoid building cars for two separate regulatory regimes, would follow the standards set by California and its follower states.
While much of the media focus on the Congressional action and the Presidential signing focused on how it would impact a California-led push to more ZEVS, including passenger cars as well as heavy duty trucks, the Newsom statement focused not only on that but also on the legal issues surrounding using the CRA to kill waivers.
“Waivers do not expire, and there is no process for revoking a waiver,” the statement said. “This is important because governments and industry rely on market certainty that waivers provide for years after they are granted to deliver clean vehicles and develop clean air plans.”
ACT mandates a rising percentage of ZEVs into the 2040s that OEMs must sell into California. The omnibus NoX rule called for steeper reductions in nitrogen oxide emissions from heavy duty vehicles than what is called for in federal rules.
The ACF was designed to produce a demand for all those ZEV vehicles that the OEMs were expected to sell into California under the ACT. But without the ACF, the ability of the ACT to accomplish its goals has been called into question.
CALSTART gives out some numbers
Just days before the Presidential signing, CALSTART, which described itself as a “national nonprofit driving the clean transportation revolution,” produced its annual report on the state of ZEV trucks nationwide.
The group has a wide definition of “truck,” as it includes cargo vans, medium-duty (MD) step vans, MD trucks, heavy-duty (HD) trucks, refuse trucks and yard tractors. Its data is as of December 31, 2024.
The key numbers in the CALSTART report:
- More than 52,500 ZEV trucks have been deployed nationwide.
- The number of trucks deployed in 2024 was 22,692, which was up 76% from the prior year. But in the last six months of 2024, that number was just 9,841, so less than 50% for half of the year.
- The number of new truck registrations nationwide was 978,748 last year. ZEV trucks accounted for 2.3% of that, a figure that was down from 3% a year earlier.
- If the goal is still in place to have a fully ZEV truck fleet by 2040, and an interim goal of 30% by 2030, that pace of registrations needs to double.
Of those total deployments, CALSTART said 11% are for heavy duty vehicles. The largest segment is for ZE cargo vans, such as the Rivian vehicles that are in heavy use by Amazon. That category accounts for 89% of all ZEV deployments.
ZE cargo vans continue to dominate ZET deployments, comprising 89% of all ZETs nationwide.
The remaining 11% is distributed across HD trucks (4%),
The rest of the distribution is 3% for yard tractors and medium duty step vans, 1% for medium duty trucks, and 0.2% for refuse trucks.
And while CALSTART is a vocal cheerleader for ZEV technology, it did not hesitate to say the arithmetic growth in ZEV usage was a long way from the exponential growth needed to make a serious dent in market share.
The lack of that exponential growth, according to CALSTART, has been caused by several factors: high upfront costs for growing a ZEV fleet; lack of charging infrastructure; and “the upfront costs and policy uncertainty at both the federal and state levels has created hesitation among fleets, OEMs, and infrastructure providers to invest.”
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