Spotlight: California freezes Trump's auto emission rollback plans in key battle for future

by Peter Mertz

LOS ANGELES, June 1 (Xinhua) -- In the one month since 18 states including the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration over proposed relaxed emissions standards, California has chosen the path of least resistance -- it's going full-scale electric.

"That's the push now," said Bill Magavern from California's Coalition for Clean Air, a non-profit organization on air quality issues.

Magavern told Xinhua on Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump's attempt to undo decades of emissions standards is "illegal," saying he must go through the regulatory process to enact these changes.

California is the only U.S. state under the Clean Air Act of 1970 allowed to write its own emissions laws due to debilitating and dangerous smog in its large coastal cities.

"Californians will never back down on auto exhaust standards because it is such a clear case of public health -- there is no room even for debate," said San Francisco businessman Glenn Nemhauser.

America's most populous state spearheaded the May 1 multi-state lawsuit to stop the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) plans to rollback emissions standards, and is now pushing for "all electric" cars by 2050, said clean air groups.

California is the nation's leader in electric cars, with sales jumping almost 30 percent a year in 2016 and 2017 and the governor's office's projecting five million "emissions-free" cars on the road by 2030, said Magavern.

Magavern told Xinhua that his state is ramping up incentives -- such as a 5,000-U.S.-dollar rebate -- for citizens to buy a fuel cell vehicle.

Trump's ability to bypass decades of scientific data showing the ill effects of air pollution will result in a protracted court battle, "that will outlast him in office," California Governor Jerry Brown said in early May.

A report released in May by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) found that especially outside wealthy California areas, demand keeps growing rapidly and that the elimination of fossil fuel-burning vehicles is a reality.

"At some point, there's liftoff in the market. The vehicles will become mainstream and not just hit a couple niches," said ICCT spokesman Nic Lutsey.

Two weeks ago at the University of California, Riverside, the powerful California Air Resources Board (CARB) gathered engineers, scholars, academics, government and industry officials to discuss the interplay of research, policy and technology to fight smog and reduce climate-changing gases from cars, trucks, and buses.

"Our mission is to protect our residents and reduce harmful carbon emissions into the atmosphere," CARB spokesman Stanley Young told Xinhua, whose staff flew to Washington D.C. at the same time to discuss emissions modifications with EPA officials.

At Riverside, a "rare display of zero-emission cars, trucks, and buses that are just now beginning to enter the marketplace" was shown by CARB, reflecting Magavern's focus on the future.

"How best to accelerate the market penetration of electric cars," was the question of the hour, posed by both Magavern and CARB, an organization that was founded in 1967 and has a 600-billion-dollar budget today.

Not only are there legitimate health concerns from carbon dioxide emissions, there is also the destruction of the ozone layer and harmful greenhouse gas emissions that are being released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burners, environmentalists said.

California's dirty air causes 19,000 premature deaths, 9,400 hospitalizations and more than 300,000 respiratory illnesses including asthma and acute bronchitis, according to a 2011 study by the American Heart and Lung Association.

And while the EPA has yet to put forth new standards to replace Obama administration rules, it has drafted regulations that would drastically weaken the Obama regulations after 2020.

Concentrations of air pollutants, such as nitrous oxides and ozone, declined by 70-80 percent during 1962-2016, according to the EPA, but despite great progress in air quality improvement, approximately 123 million people nationwide lived in counties with pollution levels above acceptable levels, the agency said in 2017.

Los Angeles is one of the most notorious cities suffering from transportation smog for much of the 20th century, a 2015 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report said.

NOAA has said conditions in southern California were so bad that it was "sometimes said that Los Angeles was a synonym for smog."

"(Governor) Jerry Brown takes these responsibilities to future generations seriously," Washington policy insider and attorney David Richardson told Xinhua.

"He is correct that the Trump administration cannot change federal regulations without having a reasonable basis for doing so, and this legal battle will take years," Richardson said of a national lawsuit brought by the California governor's office.

With the most polluted summer months in southern California just ahead in July and August, California officials were moving forward rapidly to increase incentives for state residents to buy electric cars.

"California has very serious air pollution issues especially in Los Angeles due to a congested population and automobile culture, as opposed to European public train culture," Nemhauser said.

"The speed at which we move to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere determines how many generations of our children and our children's children will have to deal with this looming catastrophe."

"We will be judged on how we act in this moment. We will be judged by how seriously we considered the information we were provided in this moment and how decisively we acted in response," he added. Enditem