California’s Clean Air Conundrum

Guest

Mary Nichols

Former Chair, California Air Resources Board; Former Distinguished Visiting Fellow, CGEP

Transcript

Mary Nichols: Losing the waivers is a bad thing. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat it or pretend that it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s important to recognize that there are other tools that states have available to them, which are powerful and which have not always been harnessed in tandem.

Bill Loveless: California has long led the nation in pioneering clean air regulations—from grappling with smog to setting ambitious zero emission vehicle mandates. The Golden State’s unique authority under the Clean Air Act has allowed it to set stricter emission standards than federal requirements, with other states often following its lead.

But that leadership now faces an unprecedented challenge. Last month, Congress voted to revoke three Clean Air Act waivers that the Biden administration had granted California, waivers that would have transitioned passenger cars to zero emissions by 2035. It was the first time in over 60 years that federal lawmakers blocked any of California’s dozens of car and truck rules, and the state quickly responded with a lawsuit.

So what happens next? Can California slash emissions from the transportation sector without this federal support? If not, how can it reach its overall climate goals? And what does this political battle mean for the future of clean transportation and states’ abilities to regulate emissions nationwide?

This is Columbia Energy Exchange Weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless

Today on the show, Mary Nichols.

Mary is a distinguished environmental lawyer and policy expert with over five decades of experience in clean air regulation. She began her career at the Center for Law in the Public Interest, bringing the first litigation under the then recently passed Clean Air Act. She twice served as chair of the California Air Resources Board, most recently from 2007 to 2020. In the mid 1990s, she also led the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation. I spoke with Mary about California’s pioneering role in clean air policy, the recent congressional vote to revoke the state’s vehicle emissions waivers, how the auto industry is reacting and what all of this means for the future of climate action in America. Here’s our conversation.

Mary Nichols, welcome back to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Mary Nichols: Thank you. Good to be here.

Bill Loveless: Well, it’s good to be with you as well, especially now with matters that are so timely and matters with which you are so familiar. California has a long history of pioneering efforts to reduce air pollutants, going back to the 1940s with the first recognized episodes of smog in Los Angeles. It’s a history in which you’ve played major roles in state and federal government. Tell us about that history.

Mary Nichols: Well, I wasn’t here in the forties …

Bill Loveless: I wasn’t suggesting that. [laughter]

Mary Nichols: Okay. Just have to make that clear. I moved to Los Angeles in 1971 right after I finished law school and I joined a public interest law firm, which was part of the new wave of environmental law firms that were created just about the same time as all the foundational environmental laws of this country were created: The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA and the founding of the U.S. EPA as an agency at the cabinet level. So I was assigned the air pollution portfolio because none of the other lawyers who had started this organization wanted to do it, even though they recognized, as everybody did, that the most important and obvious environmental problem in Los Angeles was air pollution. But nobody knew exactly what to do about it. We had this brand new law, the Clean Air Act that had just been signed into law and was barely beginning to be implemented.

And so it was my awesome task to try to figure out what to do with it. And we were approached by the city of Riverside, the mayor of Riverside, who was a longtime local political figure who had been really kind of turning towards the city of Los Angeles to the west and consistently shaking his fist at them because the cars and the factories and the power plants were in LA and the smog was all moving to the east into his city, making what had once been an area that was known as a health sanitarium back in the forties and earlier into a place that was known for having the worst smog anywhere in California or at that point anywhere else that we knew about in the country. So he wanted us to sue Los Angeles, and we informed him that we couldn’t really think of any legal theory that we could use to shut down the city of Los Angeles to prevent the smog.

But there was this new law that said that the state of California was required to come up with a plan that would reduce the levels of air pollution down to a point that had been designated by the US EPA as protecting public health for the general population, including sensitive people. And that the state of California had not done that plan. They had submitted some paperwork to US EPA, but the paperwork basically said the air here is so bad and we’ve done everything we can possibly do and we can’t think of anything else to do, so that’s just going to be the way it is. And I very simply took a look at what the statute said, and the statute said that if the state had not submitted an adequate plan, then it was up to the federal government, the US EPA to prepare a plan and put that into effect. And so we went off to the races from there, but in the meantime, what California had been doing was trying to get the car companies to put out cleaner vehicles because it was already known that a growing problem and the thing that was going to be most difficult to control was going to be all the traffic and the vehicles.

Bill Loveless: And the big concern then, Mary, at that time was really the smog, right? Greenhouse gases became a bigger concern later then it was really all that smog.

Mary Nichols: We didn’t really start to take greenhouse gases and global warming seriously at all until the nineties. In fact, I remember early on some of the arguments that we had with the car companies were about the impact of various kinds of smog control devices on fuel efficiency, on fuel economy, and we just said, we’re not interested in that. That’s not our problem. It was only much later that we began to take a broader and more holistic view of the situation and to see that we had to deal with both the amount of gasoline that was being burned and what was coming out of the tailpipes and the evaporating off of the crankcase of cars.

Bill Loveless: And you won that. You won that lawsuit. Yes, it was a landmark decision.

Mary Nichols: We did. It took a while, but eventually we were upheld at the Supreme Court in saying that greenhouse gases were also air pollutants. And now as a matter of fact, that decision is being reviewed by EPA. The Trump administration is taking another look at whether there’s any danger coming from the greenhouse gases.

Bill Loveless: And I want to talk more in a few minutes about that legal situation, but again, under the Clean Air Act, California enjoys special authority to enact regulations stricter than those enforced elsewhere. What was the rationale for that exception?

Mary Nichols: Yeah, so the 1970 Clean Air Act, which was a much slimmer volume than it is today, has a special exception in it for California. So the auto industry fought against the Clean Air Act, but finally agreed to it if they could have federal preemption so that they wouldn’t have multiple states adopting different and potentially conflicting standards. That’s something that usually large industries seek is to have one standard that’s operating at the federal level. California refused to support the Clean Air Act unless we received grandfathering that would allow us to maintain our own stricter standards because we had been trying to regulate the cars and had some success for several years before the 1970 Clean Air Act was adopted. So we won that battle and every time the Clean Air Act has been up for renewal since then, it’s been readopted. So this is something that California has fought for our political leaders, including then Governor Reagan, Governor Wilson, as well as Governor Schwarzenegger and Governor Brown of course, and today Gavin Newsom have all fought to maintain that authority.

Bill Loveless: Republican and Democratic governors over the years. To what extent have other states taken advantage of that provision to follow California’s lead?

Mary Nichols: So other states were given the right to adopt California’s standards at a point in the eighties when it became clear that they might also be having a hard time reaching the health standards with anything that they could do with industries that were under their own control. And so for various pieces of our vehicle program, we have a dozen to 14 states that follow California.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, that’s interesting. And have,

Mary Nichols: They’re east coast states and West Coast states. So Washington, Oregon and then the whole Eastern Seaboard plus a couple of the northern Midwest states all have adopted California standards. They don’t have a choice of adopting standards of their own. They can only follow California.

Bill Loveless: But obviously these states felt as though the California regulations could be effectively implemented within their boundaries.

Mary Nichols: Yes, they saw that California was getting cars that met our standards and that were otherwise attractive cars. The vehicle industry was doing fine, cars were being sold in California, people were not having any problem with driving, and so they thought it would make sense for them to go along. I think many states also feel that they have the ability to be leaders and want to be leaders in promoting clean technologies, especially in urban areas where people breathe smog from traffic right in their faces. And so they were happy to pick up on the California standards.

Bill Loveless: The California Air Resources Board has taken steps in recent years to increase targets for reducing emissions largely through a phased transition to zero emission vehicles. It was those steps that led to trouble in Washington recently. What has the board been trying to do in these recent years?

Mary Nichols: Well, going back to the realization that we needed to look both at the greenhouse gas impacts of our vehicles, and we’re talking not just about passenger cars, but also about medium and heavy duty vehicles as well, because now the trucks, particularly the larger commercial vehicles, have as much total impact as passenger cars do. And so it’s a really important part of the equation, but it’s a somewhat different industry. And of course it’s also a big part of the California economy because we are the place where our port of LA Long Beach is the largest port in the United States. Trucks going to and from the port are a very large contributor both to urban air pollution and to greenhouse gas emissions. So we’ve been gradually trying to turn over the fleet to being eventually a hundred percent zero emission vehicles as that technology has emerged. When the board first adopted a relatively small percentage sales mandate for passenger cars, electric vehicles were really in their infancy, but the technology was being worked on mainly in Japan, and it was really Toyota with the first of the hybrid engines that was the original manufacturer that had shown that you could increasingly operate on a battery without having to burn any petroleum or other liquid kinds of fuels at all.

And the Toyota engineers told the Air Resources Board that they were concerned that their bosses, their CEO and others, would not really be very interested in investing in this new technology because they weren’t convinced that there was a market there. And so in essence, they asked California to adopt a sales mandate to keep the focus of the business side of their company on producing electric – or at that point, hybrid – vehicles. Since that time, the idea of a sales mandate as a way to convince the companies that they needed to put the effort, the engineering energy into making electric cars has just grown over time. And of course the big breakthrough was with Tesla, which came in with a hundred percent battery electric car that was also a luxury car and very attractive to upper-end buyers. And since that time, the whole field has just taken off with every company now that sells cars anywhere in the world having at least one or two models of all electric vehicles. But it really started with that sales mandate.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, and CARB, the California Air Resources Board requested a waiver from the feds to require 35% of new 2026 model cars sold in the state to be zero emissions, 68% in 2030 and a hundred percent in 2035. Did I get that right, Mary?

Mary Nichols: Yes.

Bill Loveless: And of course that was there. We were just talking about passenger vehicles, passenger cars. It’s interesting though that the rationale for this sort of thing was inspired to a significant extent by an automaker.

Mary Nichols: Yes. I think that was really the first time that it had ever occurred to CARB to do a mandate that would directly order the companies to manufacture a particular type of vehicle and punish them for not selling them. And that led to the creation of a crediting program where companies that couldn’t meet the sales targets could buy credits from other companies that were overfulfilling their requirements, and that’s what gave Tesla its start because they were not producing anything other than electric vehicles. And so they had lots of credits to sell, which of course inspired the other manufacturers to get much more serious about perfecting their own models so they wouldn’t have to buy credits from Tesla.

Bill Loveless: Well, bringing it up to the moment we saw recently where Congress voted to revoke three waivers that the Biden administration granted California to set standards phasing out gas powered cars and diesel trucks. President Trump’s signing makes it official. The votes were controversial because lawmakers relied on an untested maneuver, the so-called Congressional Review Act to reject the California waivers. As I recall, over the past six decades, EPA and Congress have never blocked any of California’s dozens of car and truck rules. Were you surprised by that vote in Washington?

Mary Nichols: I wasn’t surprised because we certainly had indications that it was coming, although we fought it until the very end, and we were really encouraged by the fact that both the Government Accounting Office, the GAO in the House, and the parliamentarian of the Senate had agreed with us that the particular process that Congress used to overturn these waivers was not appropriate, that the law that they were using didn’t apply to the waivers. This is a somewhat technical argument and we’re right now in court, the California Attorney General is suing over this issue, but the basic theory here is that the Congressional Review Act is only meant to apply to regulations and that the approval of California’s standards under the waiver provision of the Clean Air Act is not a regulation which is correct. It is not a regulation. It’s essentially a judicial determination that we’ve met the requirements of the law for getting a waiver in the first place.

The waiver is the provision in the Clean Air Act that allows for California to adopt its own standards as long as they are both more stringent and necessary for California’s purposes and that they are feasible. And that term has been interpreted over time, but basically if it’s technically feasible, which it obviously is to manufacture and sell zero-emission vehicles, California gets the waiver. That’s it. There’s no more discretion, there’s no more determination and no more politics that are supposed to be involved in this decision. So we strongly believe, and obviously we were very pleased to see that the watchdogs in the Congress also agreed with us that this was not an appropriate use of this Congressional Review authority, which is meant to apply to a regulation which would cover the whole United States. So something like an air quality standard, if EPA adopted it would be subject to the CRA, but we don’t believe that our waiver is, so we are now in court fighting that issue.

Bill Loveless: You have confidence in the state’s case against the government in this instance, quite a bit of confidence of course, but you know the law well too. So I trust that you’ve reviewed this quite closely, but you also told Politico recently that you didn’t think that this had to get to this point, right? That as I read it, you were suggesting to the reporter that California may have overplayed its hand. Is that accurate or what did you mean by that?

Mary Nichols: The Trump administration has been trying to overturn California’s regulations since he was in office the first time around. They tried to do it through what would be an appropriate procedure, even if we don’t agree that it’s right, but at least from a legal perspective, what you have to do if you want to overturn a regulation is you go through a legal process or any decision, you go through the same process that you would go through to adopt it in the first place. That’s under the Administrative Procedure Act. You can do that, and they tried to do it, but they weren’t successful because you have to have a record and you have to follow notice and comment and allow people to make their case about why the regulation, if that’s what it is, is needed. And they didn’t feel like they could do that. Obviously, they were in a hurry. They wanted to do something fast. So instead they just picked up the previous administration’s action approving the waivers, sent them over to Congress and said, please help us out by getting rid of these things. If they lose on the legal theory that we’re proposing, they will probably start over again to try to overturn the previous waivers, but they’ll at least do it in accordance with the administrative process.

Bill Loveless: Do you think that California may have overplayed its hand in preparing the waiver request?

Mary Nichols: I think that it was clear as we were heading towards the election last fall that there was a possibility that Trump might return to office, and I know that there was discussion going on with the auto companies and California because they were concerned they weren’t being quiet about their concerns about whether they could meet the sales targets that are in the existing regulations. And so you have to wonder whether there was a way that this could have all been averted, but it wasn’t. It’s unclear. I certainly wasn’t in any of the rooms where there were any discussions taking place as to whether they could have reached an agreement that might’ve slowed things down a little bit or given enough latitude to the car companies on the sales mandate so that the companies would’ve felt more comfortable. But I don’t think at this point, even if the auto industry had been satisfied with what California was doing, they probably wouldn’t have kept Trump from overturning the California sales mandate anyway, because he had made it clear during his campaign that he doesn’t favor electric vehicles at all.

He wanted to not only take on California’s mandates, he wanted to repeal all of the incentives that were in federal law. There’s a tax break for sales of electric vehicles. There are breaks and funding under the Inflation Reduction Act for building out a network of charging stations across the country for battery powered electric vehicles. There are programs at the Department of Energy that are designed to promote electric transportation and electric drive transportation, including hydrogen for heavy duty vehicles. That’s also being promoted, and that’s a form of electric transport as well. So this has been federal policy for some time now that we are on a path towards zero emission electric transportation. This is not just about California and the California waiver. We were just at the head of the line to be revoked.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, California seems to have at least one car company on its side, Stellantis, which agreed to a deal last year to follow the EV rules, even if they went away and the company reaffirmed its commitment just the other day. Why is Stellantis willing to stand alone on this?

Mary Nichols: Well, they made a commitment and a contract and they’re honoring their contract, although I’m sure they would rather not have to, but I’ve found in my years as a regulator working with large companies, but especially with the auto industry, where most of our focus really has been that they follow the rules. They don’t, with very rare exceptions – and we can certainly point to a couple of examples and most prominent of which was the Volkswagen scandal – in general, they make a commitment and they stick to it, and if there’s a regulation, they follow it. And so that’s where Stellantis is. They had agreed to follow the California rules no matter what happened, and so that’s what they’re doing.

Bill Loveless: You of course, again, have confidence in the state’s lawsuit against the feds, but in the meantime, Governor Newsom has signed an executive order basically directing CARB to do a do-over on the mandates in the event that the state loses the lawsuit. What does that order entail?

Mary Nichols: Well, it’s quite a broad, comprehensive executive order that Newsom just put out, and it’s not just a reaction to Trump. It also reaffirms the state’s commitment to electric vehicles as being much broader than just ordering the manufacturers to produce the vehicles. It directs all the agencies in state government that have anything to do with transportation planning or policy that affects electric transportation to work together to promote this transition and to look for ways to use the authority of the state to promote our objectives. So it will include things like purchasing requirements for state agencies that buy vehicles and the state buys a lot of things. Everything from highway patrol cruisers to cherry pickers to construction equipment for freeways and so forth. And all of that is now going to be focused on making sure that we are working with companies that are complying with California’s requirements.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, it seems though there’s still a considerable gap between what the state might have accomplished under the rules that Congress has struck down and other steps the state can take using other authorities. I recall reading that state officials projected that by 2042, California would need 30 times more electric vehicles, six times more household electric appliances to replace gas appliances and four times more wind and solar generation capacity to meet its various emissions goals. I mean, is there really all that much the state can do in lieu of the waiver that it’s sought from the government this time around?

Mary Nichols: Well, look, losing the waivers is a bad thing. I’m not going to try to sugarcoat it or pretend that it doesn’t matter, but I think it’s important to recognize that there are other tools that states have available to them which are powerful and which have not always been harnessed in tandem. So I think we’re going to see a much greater degree of cohesion and determination across the board, not just in California, but in other states that follow our standards as well. But all of this goes back, I think, to a question about the use of the market because the thing that perhaps gives me the most hope here is that the auto industry is not abandoning electric vehicles. They are still building them. In fact, they’ve just announced that several companies have announced new models that they’re putting out. They’re responding to the fact that they need to have vehicles that are more affordable if the tax incentives go away or they are otherwise hampered in rolling out these new vehicles, the companies still have long lead times before they can shift their product.

And they’ve all made that commitment not just because of some mandate coming from the government, but because they understand that that’s where the world market is going. If you look at the situation that our major auto companies find themselves in – General Motors, Ford, et cetera – right now, they’re having a much more serious problem because of the tariffs than they are with anything relating to environmental or fuel economy regulations. So I think their focus, and frankly I think their interest in getting the waivers overturned is in part out of wanting to try to appease the Trump administration and its desires to impose tariffs on them for not building more of their cars in the United States when we’re dealing with a global industry. But the fact is it’s a global market and they are losing ground. We are losing ground as a country to China, which has adopted a completely different approach towards electric vehicles.

Bill Loveless: And it’s important to note that global market and the importance of it to automakers as you just did. I was reading this morning, Bloomberg NEF put out a new estimate that says EVs will be 27% of US passenger vehicle sales in 2030, down from 48% in last year’s version of its annual look ahead. And of course this comes amid Republican lawmakers and Trump officials scuttling tax credits and emissions rules, but that’s the US market. You’re saying there’s a much broader, the global market is what obviously automakers are most focused on.

Mary Nichols: Unlike the United States, many other parts of the world that are big markets and certainly the growth markets for the auto industry are places that don’t have their own domestic gas production. They don’t have petroleum. South America for years had mandates to use ethanol made from sugarcane in Brazil. And so looking to where the growth is likely to be in Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, the worldwide trend is towards battery electric or in some cases hydrogen made from mostly now from natural gas, but increasingly made from water. As transportation grows as the demand and the need for that kind of energy grows, the US needs to be there. And we have technologies that are attractive and could be competitive, but we’re not getting the same kind of support from the government to compete that Chinese and Korean South Korean companies are getting from their governments.

Bill Loveless: Meanwhile, there’s another threat looming according to a story I read in Politico and the Trump administration could attempt to sanction California for failing to meet federal air quality standards under the Clean Air Act standards that the state it seems won’t reach given recent developments. CARB’s chairman Leanne Randolph cautioned state lawmakers that it could be years before a court decision is reached, the litigation you just referred to, and the state will have to find alternatives or risk losing billions of dollars in federal highway funds. Is it fair to say there’s little, I guess this gets back to what we were talking about a minute ago, but little or not as much as we might expect the state can do to drive off that sort of risk?

Mary Nichols: Well, the administrator of EPA has said, of course, that they would not try to sanction California, that that just wouldn’t happen. But he’s not necessarily in control of that situation because again, going back to the Federal Clean Air Act, there’s a provision in the law that says that any citizen can sue the federal government in federal court and get an injunction ordering EPA to do what the law requires. This is a really important feature of the Clean Air Act, which is quite unusual in federal law, but it has been used a number of times and federal courts follow the statute. So if some individual who is unhappy about the smog levels or an organization, an environmental group or a public health organization, were to sue EPA for not sanctioning California or for not coming up with a solution that California could use that would meet the clean air standards, they might find themselves in a position where they had to invoke the sanctions against California. That’s really what Chair Randolph was referring to in those comments that you just read. And it’s not fanciful because the smog wars in this state go back a long way. And even though we’ve made enormous progress in cleaning up our air, it still is our number one environmental issue, and it is a real health concern. The more we know about the effects of air pollution on the lungs, especially of children with developing lungs, the more we believe that this is a real health threat.

Bill Loveless: Stepping away from California for the moment, if we may, you’re a former official of the US EPA. What do you make of the Trump administration’s plans to eliminate agency regulations on emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors?

Mary Nichols: Oh, it’s atrocious. I can’t come up with a better set of adjectives. Deregulation is not much of an answer to any real problem that exists in the world. Could we do a more clever job of regulating or more integrated regulations across the board so that companies had fewer different mandates to respond to? Maybe. But in general, the US industry has learned to live with regulation and over the years, going back to the Clinton administration where I served in Washington, that people may not remember the great efforts that were made by President Clinton and Vice President Gore to make the whole federal government more streamlined, more efficient to reduce overlap or unnecessary burdens to slim down the size of the federal government, which has not grown in recent years at all. In fact, EPA has shrunk over the years and some of the problems that it was set up to deal with have been reduced.

Absolutely. Have they gone away? No, they have not. And the idea that left to their own devices, individual cities or states could solve these problems on their own is just fanciful. And I think we always should be looking as government officials, and I certainly believed this then and I believe it now, to try to make our regulations as effective as possible and as cost effective as possible so that we’re not just churning out mandates without a sense of how they fit into an overall pattern of where we would like to go as a country. But if you look at the overall transportation system, it’s in dramatic need of improvement. We are not where we could be or should be in terms of our ability as a country to move people and goods around in a way that doesn’t unduly impact not just the air, but the land, the water, all aspects of our ecosystem and we could do better. And so I just don’t think that an attack or a promise by the administrator of EPA who is the one who I think has been most full-throated in his pledge to ditch regulations is going to do anything for the economy, and it’s going to do quite a bit to shake public confidence and undermine our health.

Bill Loveless: I know from having spent years covering energy and environmental matters in Washington that undoing regulations can be as difficult as doing them in the first place. Do you think the Trump administration will be successful in scuttling these regulations?

Mary Nichols: Well, I doubt that they will succeed in scuttling all the regulations that they’ve got their eyes on, because I think every time you pass a regulation, you also create an interest group that now is invested in meeting the requirements of the regulation. And that certainly happened with clean energy and it happened with air pollution as well, that people and industries rise up to meet the requirements of a new regulation. Companies compete with each other to find ways to meet those regulations more cost effectively, and that generates new technologies. So you have whole types of technologies that come about because of the demands of the public for more clean energy, more clean transportation, and those constituencies can be discouraged. Investments can be perhaps discouraged, but most people that are looking at the current situation think that the Trump administration isn’t going to be there forever despite his occasional threats that he might try to find a way to run again, nobody really believes that that’s possible. And so it’s more a question of just being unsettling and discouraging in kind of an overall political way to people who are trying to improve the environment, but it’s not going to turn the country around or turn back the tide that has already shown that we’re on a different path.

Bill Loveless: Before we go, I’d like to ask you, as someone known as successful at the art of compromise, what is your outlook today regarding the environment, climate change and the course that the United States is on now?

Mary Nichols: I think it’s not just the United States, it’s most of the world really is grappling with how we’re going to make really significant progress against the threat of global warming, which is already, as we know here, I mean this is not a threat that’s somewhere off in the future. We are seeing the evidence now of what from the time of the Industrial Revolution has been building up in our atmosphere and is already causing significant changes in climate and weather and increasing weird weather as they call it, events. And the evidence is all over in terms of changes that are going on in our oceans and in our atmosphere, in our land cover. And it’s not going to be turned around easily. It is hard to make some of the changes that are needed, but I think there’s also reason to believe that we can make progress and are making progress in terms of both developing new technologies and developing new policies and financial mechanisms to spread cleaner technologies to the parts of the world that need them the most.

Because the United States and China and also India as the biggest contributors to current emissions have work to do. We also have the ability, by and large, to make progress. And the fact that the US is now saying that it no longer believes in trying to meet those requirements that are in the Paris Accord and that have been agreed to by every other country in the world with one other exception besides the United States, but they’re all having problems getting there. It means that it’s going to be important to look at better mechanisms for spreading the new technologies to places that need growth and that are going to need growth and are going to grow. And I think there’s a reason to believe that that can happen. Groups that are continuing to meet and work on these projects, there’s just recently has been a major new initiative going on to find ways to continue to maintain forests in the Amazon regions and to bring financial support into better forest management and to stop or slow the pace of deforestation so we can continue to store carbon in places where it’s needed.

People looking at other ways to use nature-based solutions and to promote those kinds of solutions and a continuing interest on the part of the public, especially local governments and state governments in promoting these kinds of changes. So it’s a time where there’s rhetoric coming out from the top, which is unhelpful, but action going on the ground, which is actually hopeful and positive. And I think if we can keep a focus on that, we can continue to make progress and just get through some of the reaction that’s going on among people who would like to try to keep the control that they currently enjoy over some of the levers of production.

Bill Loveless: Well, a measure of hopefulness is so important to keep in mind as we work through these various issues taking place today.

Mary Nichols: Some very wise person recently reminded us that hope is not just a feeling or a desire. It has to be based on action. We need to act.

Bill Loveless: Mary Nichols, thank you for joining us today on Columbia Energy Exchange.

Mary Nichols: Thank you.

Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, Mary, and thank you for listening.

The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee. Sean Marquand is the sound engineer. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media @ColumbiaUEnergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way. We appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

California has long led the nation in pioneering clean air regulations, from grappling with smog to setting ambitious zero-emission vehicle mandates. The Golden State’s unique authority under the Clean Air Act has allowed it to set emissions standards that exceed federal requirements. Around a dozen other states have followed California’s lead.

But that leadership now faces an unprecedented challenge. Last month, Congress voted to revoke three Clean Air Act waivers that the Biden administration had granted California. It was the first time in over sixty years that federal lawmakers blocked any of California’s dozens of car and truck rules, and the state quickly responded with a lawsuit.

So what happens next? Can California slash emissions from the transportation sector without this federal support? If not, how can it reach its overall climate goals? And what does this political battle mean for the future of clean transportation—and states’ abilities to regulate emissions—nationwide?

This week, Bill Loveless speaks with Mary Nichols about California’s role in clean air policy, the impact of losing its vehicle emission waivers, how the auto industry is reacting, and what all of this means for the future of climate action in America.

Mary is a distinguished environmental lawyer and policy expert with over five decades of experience in clean air regulation. She held a number of senior posts in federal and state government, including a long tenure as chair of the California Air Resources Board. She is also a former distinguished visiting fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy, Columbia SIPA.

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