A legal challenge to the waiver granted by the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the implementation of California’s Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule is being put on hold.
On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted abeyance of the challenge while two other cases regarding EPA actions on emissions make their way through the federal court system.
Those cases are Ohio vs. EPA and Texas vs. EPA. The Ohio case, which has a long list of other red-state plaintiffs, challenged the ability of the EPA to grant California a waiver that allows it to implement emissions standards exceeding federal rules. The states filed suit in May 2022.
Texas vs. EPA challenges the federal government’s ability to mandate tighter motor vehicle emission standards. Peter Zalzal, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the intervenors in the case, told FreightWaves the “key issue there is really challenging EPA’s ability to consider electric vehicles and setting standards under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act.” He said a decision from the District of Columbia court could come down in a matter of weeks, though it might stretch out to months.
The Texas suit does not deal with the California rule directly. It was filed in November 2022.
Both the Ohio and Texas cases were heard in September in the District of Columbia court, the same venue where the lawsuit by lead plaintiff Western States Trucking Association (WSTA) against the ACT waiver was filed. That suit has other plaintiffs and a wide range of states that have signed on as intervenors, either backing the WSTA effort or in defense of the EPA and its waiver powers.
In a brief order handed down Thursday, the District of Columbia court ordered that the WSTA case be held in abeyance until resolution of Ohio vs. EPA and Texas vs. EPA.
The EPA had requested the abeyance Nov. 24. In that request, the agency said the briefs submitted by the plaintiffs in the WSTA case “now show that the large majority of issues presented in this case are, in fact, already before the Court in Ohio v. EPA and Texas v. EPA.”
“Resolution of those two cases could decide or substantially narrow the issues in this [the WSTA] case,” the EPA wrote.
The Advanced Clean Trucks rule is a mandate on OEMs and their sales into the Golden State. The ACT calls for zero-emission vehicles to represent 55% of Class 2b-3 truck sales, 75% of Class 4-8 straight truck sales and 40% of Class 7-8 tractor sales by 2035. After that, there is a 100% ZEV sales requirement beginning in 2036.
The separate Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule in California is seen as a partner regulation to the ACT, as it mandates the ZEV composition in fleets as opposed to the ACT mandate on truck sales into the state. The California Air Resources Board only last month filed a waiver request with EPA for the ACF after controversy over whether such a waiver was necessary.
The filing of the waiver request for the ACF rule came several weeks after the California Trucking Association filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California against implementation of the ACF, saying CARB needed a waiver to promulgate the rule.
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