There is little question that California leaders already see fossil fuels as a relic of the past.
At the Southern California headquarters of the state’s powerful clean-air regulator, the centerpiece art installation depicts in limestone a petrified gas station. Fuel nozzles lie on the ground in decay, evoking an imagined extinction of gas pumps.
For more than half a century, the federal government has allowed California to set its own stringent pollution limits, a practice that has resulted in more efficient vehicles and the nation’s most aggressive push toward electric cars. Many Democratic-led states have adopted California’s standards, prompting automakers to move their national fleets in the same direction.
With that unusual power, however, has come resentment from Republican states where the fossil fuel industry still undergirds their present and future. When Republicans in Congress last week revoked the state’s authority to set three of its mandates on electric vehicles and trucks, they saw it not just as a policy reversal but also as a statement that liberal California should be put in its place.
“We’ve created a superstate system where California has more rights than other states,” Representative Morgan Griffith, who represents rural southwestern Virginia, said in an interview. “My constituents think most folks in California are out of touch with reality. You see this stuff coming out of California and say, ‘What?’”
Federal law typically pre-empts state law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. But in 1967, the federal government allowed smoggy California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency to enact its own clean-air standards that were tougher than federal limits, because the state historically had some of the most polluted air in the nation. Federal law also allows other states to adopt California’s standards as their own under certain circumstances.
California has used that authority to build one of the world’s most powerful environmental agencies, the California Air Resources Board. The board now regulates the airborne emissions released by everything from perfumes to power plants. Products that repeatedly fail to comply with its standards can be barred from sale in the state.
So many consumers live in California or in states like New York and Pennsylvania that adopt the same standards that manufacturers see little to be gained by making their products in two versions, one to satisfy those states’ rules and another for the rest of the country. So California’s requirements often become de facto national standards.
The policy that has drawn the most Republican opposition has been California’s mandate to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles starting in 2035.
Republicans, whose party has strong ties to the oil industry, spoke last week about why electric vehicles would be impractical for their constituents.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said on the floor that electric vehicles’ limited range made them unsuitable for farmers, ranchers and others in his rural state who must drive long distances each day.
Though California’s rules would not bar the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles anywhere else, Mr. Barrasso and other Republicans suggested that without the California market, manufacturers would curb their production.
“Every American would lose options — whether you live in California or not,” Mr. Barrasso said. “California’s E.V. mandates ban the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks. No more in America. Can you imagine that in Oklahoma or my home state of Wyoming?”
Their arguments also ventured into the ideological realm. In floor arguments and in statements to The New York Times, Republican lawmakers spoke of what the technology — and California — represented to the wider populace.
“The American public on Election Day rejected the liberal agenda of California, whether it comes to E.V.s, whether it comes to open borders, whether it comes to sanctuary cities, a sanctuary state, their efforts to defund police,” Mr. Barrasso said in his floor speech.
Other Republican lawmakers condemned what they called California’s “extreme environmental agenda.” Representative Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas, said in a statement that the “radical liberal state of California” should not be governing for the “hard-working patriots in my district.”
Mr. Nehls is the House author of the Stop California from Advancing Regulatory Burden Act of 2025. It is otherwise known as the Stop C.A.R.B. Act, an indication of just how large California’s air board — known by its initials, C.A.R.B. — looms in the eyes of Republicans. That bill, which would repeal the section of the Clean Air Act that lets California get waivers to set its own regulations, is pending in the House, as is a similar measure in the Senate.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the smog in Los Angeles was so thick that the giant Hollywood sign often could not be seen from just a few miles away. .
Over the years, C.A.R.B. sharply reduced the state’s pollution problem by enacting stringent rules, many of which were eventually adopted nationwide. California’s regulatory climate encouraged technical innovations like the low-emission engine that Honda produced in the 1970s; the three-way catalytic converter with an oxygen sensor that Volvo pioneered later that decade; and Tesla’s popularization of electric vehicles.
Ann Carlson, who helped write policies for the Biden administration on tailpipe emissions and now teaches law at the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled the severe smog that made her eyes burn and her lungs ache when she was a child in Southern California in the 1960s. The bad air was a product of the postwar explosion in population across a vast area of the Los Angeles basin, high rates of car ownership and topography that tended to trap smog, she said.
“Cars today are 99.5 percent cleaner than they were when they had no emission control,” Ms. Carlson said. “That’s almost all because of California.”
Crucial to California’s efforts was Mary Nichols, an environmental attorney who helped transform the state air board into an international power.
Her leadership was so influential that the agency dedicated its Southern California office to her. In 2022, Ms. Nichols and other California leaders christened the new building by cutting a gasoline hose with a pair of oversized shears.
On Friday, the day after the Senate vote, Ms. Nichols sounded sanguine about the fact that California — and the work of her former agency — was being targeted by federal lawmakers.
“That’s the price you pay for success, I suppose,” Ms. Nichols, who lives in Los Angeles, said in an interview. “We’re in a period of lashing out against all kinds of progress, and that’s what C.A.R.B. represents.”
She said that the federal government over the years had sent members of the board’s staff to India, China and Russia to help other countries with their smog problems. In turn, delegates from countries around the world have visited Sacramento to learn about what the state has done to reduce its emissions, she said.
Is California trying to influence national policy?
“There’s no question about that,” Ms. Nichols said. But she added, “It’s not a crusade to make the rest of the world look like California. It’s a recognition that we’ve been privileged to be able to pioneer some very good technologies, and we’re pleased to be able to share them with the world.”
Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said that he thought Republicans were upset that so many states wanted to follow California’s lead.
“Their overarching goal was not energy independence,” Mr. Schiff said. “Their overarching goal was oil dependence, and California was making the country less dependent on oil.”
Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, suggested that Republicans were acting counter to the states’ rights philosophy that had been a core principle of their party. And he warned that Republicans were giving China an economic advantage, as electric vehicles become essential around the world.
“It’s wrongheaded that they have it in for California as badly as they do,” he said.
The three bills passed by the Senate Thursday had already been approved by the House, and President Trump is expected to sign them all. To pass the bills, though, the Senate acted against a ruling by its own nonpartisan parliamentarian, who said that it was inappropriate to use the provisions of the Congressional Review Act in the way the Senate did, to revoke California’s clean air waivers and to avoid a filibuster.
Rob Bonta, California’s Democratic attorney general, has said he would sue the federal government if the bills became law. Mr. Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom denounced the congressional moves at a news conference Thursday, and displayed a sign declaring that “Trump’s G.O.P. Is Making America Smoggy Again.”
Mr. Griffith, the Virginia representative, said he thought electric vehicles might be all right for California but were not suitable for his large, mountainous district and the cold winter weather of central Appalachia. And he argued that it did not make sense for California policies to influence Virginia.
“They’re different from us,” Mr. Griffith said. “They don’t think the same way we think.”
Conor Dougherty contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
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