California Largely Won Its Climate Fight With Trump. Round 2 Could Be Tougher

California has arguably never had so much climate momentum, enjoying a moment of alignment between its strong environmental goals and federal policy after battling with the Trump administration.

However, a second term for former President Donald Trump — a Trump vs. California 2.0 — would almost certainly be a vicious legal rematch between the most populous state in the nation and an administration intent on weakening its regulations and protections.

California and the Trump administration were constantly fighting in court and in the headlines, with the state participating in almost 100 lawsuits against the U.S. during his presidency, according to a tracker developed by a Marquette University political scientist.

In hindsight, the state’s laws and policies emerged relatively unscathed. However, during a second Trump term, the administration could be more successful in hampering California’s climate and environmental policies.

For one, Trump staffers are likely to be more focused and competent than they were the first time around. Secondly, the legal landscape has changed as Trump-appointed judges sit on benches everywhere, from the Supreme Court to local districts.

Mary Nichols, former head of the California Air Resources Board, was one of the chief architects of California’s ultimately successful legal battle against the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the state’s strict auto-emissions standards.

The state was helped, Nichols said, by the fact that many Trump appointees “took a long time to figure out how to do as much damage as they wanted to do.”

The state often beat them on the grounds that they hadn’t followed correct procedures. But during a second Trump administration, “they’ve already said they’re going to be much more prepared this time around to move very quickly, to start to dismantle everything they can possibly dismantle. So, it will be hard.”

On the other hand, with Vice President Kamala Harris poised as the Democratic standard bearer, the Golden State could see one of its own leading the White House. Raised in the Bay Area before she went on to serve as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, Harris has spent much of her career working on environmental and climate issues. A Harris administration could help the state meet its goals and perhaps give it additional momentum.

The legal landscape has changed

No matter who the next person to enter the White House is, California’s legal chessboard has changed.

“The danger, of course, is the Supreme Court,” Nichols said, “which, in his first term, Trump succeeded in skewing very far to the right and particularly far in the direction of supporting an attack on any type of regulatory activity.”

Notably, in June, the court overturned a 1984 Supreme Court decision known as the Chevron doctrine. That long-standing precedent said judges in lower courts should defer to the expertise of federal agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, when the laws passed by Congress are vague.

That decision fits into a larger pattern, said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA and former chief counsel and acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, under the Biden-Harris administration.

“The Supreme Court in the past year and a half or so has taken up four separate environmental cases and has struck down environmental regulations in every one of them, and they’ve done so on different grounds,” Carlson said.

The basis of those decisions — what’s known as the major questions doctrine — could be a bigger threat to California’s ability to regulate itself than any individual decision, such as the Chevron doctrine, she said.

“The basic idea from the court is that if a regulation transforms the economy in a significant way, and Congress hasn’t directly told the agency to issue that regulation, then the agency lacks the power to do that,” Carlson said.

In 2022, the court used this doctrine to invalidate the Clean Power Plan (despite it already being scuttled by the Trump administration). It was used to invalidate vaccine mandates for corporations and businesses under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The court also used it to strike down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

“So this is a doctrine that they’ve been employing a lot to invalidate big regulatory programs issued by the Biden administration,” Carlson said.

A petition for the court to take up a case challenging California’s ability to set its own extra-tough vehicle emissions standards is still pending. Under that authority, California has enacted the Advanced Clean Cars Program and will push automakers to sell an increasing number of electric vehicles in the state. The state considers this key to meeting not only its climate goals but also its clean air requirements.

Regardless of who is the next president, “there’s big legal threats right now to California’s ability to regulate,” Carlson said. “And then if Trump were to succeed and be elected president, there will be big political threats to California’s authority to regulate.”

Nichols, the former head of the California Air Resources Board, worries that the legal threats will make state officials wary of carrying out lawsuits. “Are we so afraid of being taken to court or going to court that we end up, you know, not standing up for things that we should be standing up for?”

California is likely to continue to face challenges at the Supreme Court, she said, but the state’s prospects will depend on the individual cases.

“I’m not convinced that this Supreme Court is just out to screw California or that they really want to, you know, prevent electric cars,” Nichols said. “We’re not automatically screwed. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be harder than it was the last time around.”

Whatever happens in November

Ignoring the political horse race for a moment, Californians would do well to consider the fact that climate change is real, being felt by residents of the state every day and that burning fossil fuel is the primary driver of global heating.

“We are on the edge of existential crisis,” Carlson said. “We cannot afford to wait any longer to attack the problem as vigorously as possible.”