California v. EPA

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Seven organizations led by Center for Biological Diversity challenged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision to withdraw the Mid-Term Evaluation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Model Year 2022–2025 Light-Duty Vehicles.

The National Coalition for Advanced Transportation—a “coalition of companies that supports electric vehicle and other advanced transportation technologies and related infrastructure”—filed a petition for review challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) action withdrawing the Obama-era determination that greenhouse gas standards for light-duty vehicles for model years 2022-2025 remained appropriate. In April 2018, EPA issued a revised determination finding that the standards appeared to be too stringent. The Coalition challenging this determination includes Tesla, Inc. and a number of utilities.

The D.C. Circuit concluded that it did not have jurisdiction to consider the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) withdrawal of the Obama administration’s mid-term determination that model year 2022 to 2025 greenhouse gas emission standards promulgated in 2012 remained appropriate. The D.C. Circuit said the withdrawal was not a final agency action because it did not satisfy the second prong of the Supreme Court’s Bennett v. Spear test for final agency action, which requires that a final action determine rights or obligations or establish legal consequences. The court noted that the withdrawal did not itself change the emission standards established in 2012 but only created the possibility that the standards could be modified in the future, similar to an agency’s grant of a petition for reconsideration of a rule. The court was not persuaded by the petitioners’ arguments that the withdrawal satisfied the second prong because it had the direct legal consequence of requiring EPA to conduct rulemaking, because it created legal consequences for states that had to act quickly to put California’s standards in place in accordance with Section 117 of the Clean Air Act, and because it withdrew the Obama administration’s determination, which was itself a final agency action.