Why California Goes Its Own Way on the Environment
As the Trump administration targets the state’s power to regulate auto emissions, author David Vogel explains where that power came from.
LA still loves its cars.
Photographer: Jonathan Alcorn/Bloomberg
Last week, Bloomberg News reporters broke the story that, as part of a broader effort by the Donald Trump administration to relax emissions and fuel-economy standards for new cars,
This particular waiver dates to 2013 and was granted by the EPA under Barack Obama after the George W. Bush EPA had turned down the state’s first attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions by cars in 2007. But California’s ability to set its own auto-emissions standards goes back many decades, so to get a better sense of how that came to be, I talked to David Vogel, an emeritus professor of business and political science at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the new history “California Greenin’: How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader.” What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation.