WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Friday that fuel producers may challenge an unusual federal program that lets California set its own limits on vehicle tailpipe emissions to combat climate change.
The question for the justices was whether the challengers had suffered the sort of injuries that gave them standing to sue. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in December, it said it would not address whether the Environmental Protection Agency program granting California a waiver to set its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions was lawful.
A federal law authorizes the EPA to grant California a waiver even though other states and localities are not free to set their own limits. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in an unsigned opinion last year, rejected the fuel producers’ lawsuit, ruling that the challengers lacked standing. The appeals court reasoned that the challengers would not be directly harmed by the waiver, since its immediate impacts were only on vehicle manufacturers.
Writing for a seven-member majority Friday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said fuel producers would suffer harm from the waiver and so had standing to sue.
“Without California’s regulations in effect,” he wrote, “manufacturers would likely make more cars powered by gasoline and other liquid fuels, thereby increasing purchases of those fuels.”
Kavanaugh stressed the limits of the ruling. “This case concerns only standing, not the merits,” he wrote. “EPA and California may or may not prevail on the merits in defending EPA’s approval of the California regulations.”
Created under the 1970 Clean Air Act, the California waiver has for decades served as a tool to allow the state, which has historically had the most polluted air in the nation, to enact tougher state-level clean air standards than those set by the federal government.
During his first term, Trump revoked an Obama-era version of the California waiver, but in 2022, President Joe Biden reinstated it. During his presidential campaign last year, Trump promised to “rip up” the California waiver as part of his broader battle to destroy policies intended to combat climate change.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson each filed dissents. In hers, Jackson wrote that the court should not have decided the issue, given that Trump was likely to once again rescind the waiver and make the issue moot.
The California waiver can be used to rein in toxic, smog-causing pollutants including soot, nitrogen dioxide and ozone that lead to asthma and lung disease. But in the 21st century, California rulemakers have used the waiver to curb emissions including carbon dioxide, the invisible greenhouse gas emitted by burning coal and oil that is the chief cause of global warming.
Because the tailpipes of gasoline-powered cars are the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide pollution, California’s use of the waiver to address that pollution soon grew into one of the nation’s, and then the world’s, most transformative and ambitious programs to fight climate change by transitioning to electric vehicles.
Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, emphasized the limits of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“While the Supreme Court has now clarified who has grounds to bring a challenge to court,” she said in a statement, “the decision does not affect California’s bedrock legal authority to adopt pollution safeguards, nor does alter the lifesaving, affordable, clean cars program itself.”
Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said in a statement that the ruling was a disappointment. “The fight for clean air,” he said, “is far from over.”
