Clean Air Act illegally gives California control over federal emissions standards

Herman Ewell started his trucking company, H.R. Ewell, Inc., back in 1946, delivering milk in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The company has since grown and flourished. While still a family business run by Herman’s son, Calvin Ewell, and still based in Pennsylvania, it now employs 200 drivers and works with 50 independent truckers to deliver food across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

The family business faces a staggering threat—from 3,000 miles away. New emissions regulations created by bureaucrats in California, not Pennsylvania or Washington, DC, could bring H.R. Ewell to a grinding halt.

California’s extraordinary power stems from troubling provisions in the Clean Air Act (CAA), which enable federalization of California law. The CAA tasks the EPA with developing air quality standards and with developing emissions standards for vehicles. The CAA generally prohibits any state from developing its own emissions standards; however, the Act gives California—and only California—the power to create its own, much more demanding emissions standards. And once approved by the EPA, those California standards become part of the federal regulatory regime.

The CAA requires that California must technically apply for a “waiver” from federal preemption in order to create its own standards; however, the courts have concluded that the EPA has no discretion to deny California’s waiver requests on substantive grounds—like concerns over whether California’s standards are too burdensome or will inflict too much damage on companies like HR Ewell. The CAA requires that the EPA must rubber-stamp the California emissions standards as long as California reasonably certifies that its standards are more stringent than baseline EPA regulations, and that more demanding California standards are needed to address extraordinary conditions—but the EPA doesn’t have much power to second-guess California’s pinky promises.

But the Clean Air Act doesn’t let California set its own standards as a matter of state law; it incorporates California’s rules into federal law and forces the other 49 states to adopt either EPA standards or those developed by the California Air Resources Board. And every time the EPA approves a new California standard, states that had opted to abide by the old California standard must choose between following California’s ever-more-demanding standards or reverting to default EPA standards. Even if a state might prefer the old California standard as a ‘middle ground’ policy choice, they are precluded from maintaining the status quo. They aren’t permitted to simply keep the old California standards. This allows bureaucrats in California to effectively invalidate the policy choices of other states.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s standards, meaning businesses in nearly 40% of the country are governed by federally enforceable standards that neither Congress nor even the U.S. EPA had any part in crafting.

This arrangement is perhaps the worst in Pennsylvania, which is bound by a 2002 regulation to automatically adopt new California emissions standards for heavy diesel engines. In addition to relinquishing policymaking power to California without Pennsylvanians’ input or consent, the regulation has no expiration date, putting the Ewells and other Pennsylvania trucking companies forever at the mercy of another state’s regulators.

In 2021, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) imposed increasingly stringent heavy diesel engine emission standards. Rubber-stamped by the EPA in early January 2025, the new draconian standards will usher in dramatic cost hikes for new trucks and replacement engines.

Any price increase would devastate the narrow profit margins of companies like H.R. Ewell, which replaces 20 to 40 trucks per year just to maintain its fleet. And with no substantive limits on California’s power, Calvin Ewell worries that California regulators won’t stop until they altogether outlaw internal combustion engines.

The Clean Air Act gives California regulators special standing to write emissions regulations that are federally enforced beyond their own borders. But the federal government (not California) is supposed to make laws that govern the nation. Handing state governments, or anyone else, such power violates the constitutional principle known as the nondelegation doctrine.

To make matters worse, these rules are enforceable by private parties. That is, once a state opts to enforce the California standard for the purpose of CAA compliance, anyone who violates those standards can be sued for failure to comply with rules developed by regulators (potentially) thousands of miles away—in a state where a company may not even do business. Violators risk enormous fines and crushing penalties.

Calvin wants to protect his family business from California regulators dictating how he runs it. With free representation from Pacific Legal Foundation, Calvin and H.R. Ewell are fighting back with a federal lawsuit to restore the separation of powers principle that only federal officials, not California or any other states, can create federal regulations.