The EPA May Terminate California's Very Special Right to Impose More Stringent Pollution-Control Measures Than the Clean Air Act Requires on the Rest of the Nation

Big, if true.

Summing up: the Clean Air Act enacts national standards for things like cars' exhaust. But it contains a provision which states that any state may be granted a waiver permitting them to enact even more stringent regulations, so long as they're "necessary" for that state.

California has sought such a waiver and has been granted that waiver for as long as the Clean Air Act has existed.

California is the country's largest auto-market, so car manufacturers just build for California. It would be more costly to set up factories to produce some cars that are California-legal and some others that are legal everywhere else. So the waiver permits California to essentially set the nation's car-exhaust policies.

This, of course, forces the rest of the country to subsidize California's environmental occultism, as the costs of these unnecessary abatement schemes are lowered in cost because their R&D costs are shared by a nation which doesn't need them, and California gets the savings of a massive economy of scale only by drafting unwilling Americans to be forced into being consumers of the products that they demand but which few others want.

Trump's EPA seems ready to end this special perpetual waiver.

Cue the whining about "owning the libs" from the people who are owned by the libs and want to remain owned by their generous liberal masters forever and ever.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:56 PM

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