California’s Pavley Law on Vehicle Emissions and State Climate Initiatives

As an important player in global affairs, any political response to climate change will need to involve the United States. After withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, the United States government further constrained climate initiatives by first failing to recognize carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act (CAA) and then denying California the CAA waiver exemption to implement their Pavley vehicle emission standard. This paper then seeks to explore the space for state climate initiatives in the context of US environmental federalism. While scholars have looked at specific aspects within the debate such as the legality of the CAA, there isn’t any work that assesses comprehensively the entire picture by raising theoretical questions and answering them with empirical evidence from the Californian experience. This papers attempts to fill that void in existing literature. The research concludes that California is in fact unravelling trends of (traditional) environmental federalism and by virtue of the exclusive CAA waiver is furthermore reversing federalism by setting its own policy that other states are choosing to implement.