How the EPA’s environmental about-face could upend California’s climate efforts

The Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to repeal or weaken more than two dozen regulations could deliver a direct blow to California policies on air and water quality standards, electric vehicle initiatives and efforts to curb planet-harming greenhouse gas emissions.

The changes announced this week are geared toward rolling back trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes on U.S. families, according to President Trump’s new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who described the action on Wednesday as “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.”

But environmental groups were quick to condemn the plan as an abdication of the EPA’s responsibilities to Americans. In climate-conscious California, they say, it could reverse decades of progress.

“This isn’t just a step backward — it’s a wrecking ball aimed at decades of progress,” said Guillermo Ortiz, senior clean vehicles advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “California’s leadership on clean energy and environmental justice is now directly under siege by the federal government.”

Among the 31 items up for reconsideration is the EPA’s long-held conclusion that carbon dioxide emissions endanger human health and welfare, formally known as the “endangerment finding” established in 2009.

California has been aggressive in its efforts to curb CO₂, including a state law that requires a 40% emissions reduction by 2030 and an 85% reduction by 2045. The state aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2045 — five years sooner than the federal target set by the Biden administration.

Zeldin referred to the endangerment finding as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” he said.

The EPA’s plan also takes aim at the Clean Power Plan, an Obama- and Biden-era policy that seeks to slash emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas, and at the mandatory greenhouse gas reporting program that compels approximately 8,000 large greenhouse gas emitters, such as power plants and factories, to report their emissions annually.

California is home to nearly 400 of those reporting facilities, and has made gains in its efforts to reduce emissions in recent years. The state’s facilities reported 92.1 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent emissions in 2023, compared with 116.1 million metric tons a decade prior.

Repealing such programs — and potentially undermining the endangerment finding — would be akin to “denying the concept of gravity,” Ortiz said.

“It’s not deregulation — it’s science denial with a legal brief attached to it,” he said.

But the EPA isn’t focused only on emissions from large power plants and oil and gas producers. Also on the chopping block are rules that govern vehicle emissions, the largest source of air pollution in the Golden State.

Among other changes, the EPA seeks to terminate the standards surrounding light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that provided the foundation for Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, which set a goal for EVs to comprise half the cars sold in the U.S. by 2030.

Zeldin said the current federal rules impose more than $700 billion in regulatory and compliance costs, and that the EV mandate takes away Americans’ ability to select the car of their choice while increasing the cost on all products delivered by trucks.

California has set an even more aggressive target than the federal government on EV adoption, with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mandate banning the sale of gas cars by 2035 — a move the Trump administration has already set out to block.

“California has been the leading state in advancing the clean transportation industry and market,” said John Boesel, president of the clean transportation nonprofit CALSTART.

Boesel noted that the EPA in January already failed to act on a plan known as the Advanced Clean Fleets rule, which would have helped phase out heavy-duty diesel trucks in the state.

But the new changes could create even more hurdles for California’s EV transition by potentially compromising federal tax incentives, hindering the expansion of a national charging infrastructure and encouraging fossil fuel production.

“A lot of hard work went into developing the regulations and setting a direction for the future of the United States, and many companies have made major investments in a cleaner transportation future,” Boesel said. “Having this kind of regulatory uncertainty will undermine a lot of the investment and possibly discourage innovation.”

Mike Stoker, who served as the EPA’s top official for California and the Pacific Southwest during the previous Trump administration, downplayed the impact on California, however, saying the Golden State can continue to set higher standards than the federal government.

“As a general matter, most of the states that have been really strong on the environment, like California, are going to exceed whatever the minimum standard is that the EPA is regulating,” he said, adding that “these kind of actions have a much bigger impact on the states that have really opted to go with more the minimum standards.”

The goal, he said, is to eliminate rules and regulations that are costly and time consuming and to ensure that those that remain are backed up by the best possible science.

Stoker also said the deregulation announcement is not taking direct aim at electric vehicles, but rather is geared toward letting consumers dictate the marketplace.

“Their message is they don’t want the government to subsidize making electric cars happen before the market really demands it,” he said.

But federal rules don’t exist in a vacuum, said Ortiz, of the NRDC. The 31 regulatory actions are also occurring alongside job cuts and efforts to curtail California’s authority to set tailpipe emissions. What’s more, carbon dioxide and other pollutants have no regard for state lines.

“California’s climate goals and our air quality progress have been a beacon for the world, and gutting these EPA rules is like punching holes in that lighthouse,” Ortiz said. “We’re talking about more asthma in Fresno, we’re talking about deadlier wildfires, and we’re stalling out the EV transition that’s been occurring.”

The EPA’s plan also takes aim at other issues that are popular in California, including environmental justice and air and water quality standards. The agency seeks to terminate its environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion arms, Zeldin said.

California — home to some of the worst air quality in the world — has for decades worked to rectify inequities that have left the state’s low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately burdened by pollution, extreme heat, wildfire smoke and other environmental challenges, and experts fear that changes at the federal level could exacerbate those issues.

Indeed, Zeldin said the agency will reconsider air toxic standards that target coal-fired plants, as well as National Ambient Air Quality Standards that regulate six harmful pollutants. Those pollutants include particulate matter 2.5, or sooty material that is released from vehicles, industrial smokestacks and wildfires.

PM 2.5 was among the top air quality concerns in the wake of January’s firestorm in Los Angeles. Only a year ago, the Biden administration’s EPA tightened the rules around particulate matter in a move it said would prevent thousands of premature deaths.

What’s more, some of the state’s hard-won gains on water quality could be undone by the EPA’s plan to revise the definition “waters of the United States” as it applies to the federal Clean Water Act of 1972.

The rules govern water quality as well as discharge requirements for farmers, landowners and businesses, which Zeldin said place an undue burden on Americans and drive up the cost of doing business.

Opponents said loosening such guidelines could leave water systems more vulnerable to dangerous pollutants and discharge, especially in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision that limited federal protections for wetlands in favor of property rights.

“We cannot sit idly by while the U.S. Supreme Court, and now the Federal Administration, take calculated steps to compromise the federal Clean Water Act and the protections it has provided for decades,” state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) said in a statement.

Allen recently introduced legislation that would enshrine into state law the previous federal protections removed by the Supreme Court. The lack of these and other protections could threaten the health and well-being of millions of Californians, he said.

But experts cautioned that the EPA’s proposed changes cannot be imposed unilaterally, and said due process must include scientific and legal justification for each decision, as well as listening and responding to public feedback. It is likely that many of the changes will face lengthy legal challenges from opposition groups.

Boesel, of CALSTART, said he remains optimistic that California will continue to make progress on climate change despite the potentially bumpy road ahead. But he underscored that it is important for the EPA to continue to show leadership at a national and global level.

“The United States represents about 5% of the world’s population and generates nearly 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “So the United States really needs to be a global team player and do what it can to avert a climate disaster.”