American Trucking Associations and several oil producer and user trade groups have asked an appeals court to reconsider a three-judge appeals panel’s ruling upholding California’s low-carbon fuel standard.
California’s carbon standard requires that fuel providers reduce greenhouse-gas emissions associated with transportation fuels sold in the state by 10% by 2020.
The appeals panel called the regulation an “innovative, nondiscriminatory regulation to impede global warming.”
But ATA and its fellow petitioners, including the American Fuels & Petrochemical Manufacturers Association, said in their petition that the panel applied the wrong legal concept to test whether the low-carbon standard discriminates against out-of-state farmers and oil and biofuel refiners.
“The LCFS seeks to impose California’s environmental standards on fuel producers in other states and countries by penalizing imported fuels that are produced and transported in a manner that California disfavors,” said the rehearing petition filed Nov. 2 with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
If the LCFS were to remain in effect, transportation fuels sold in the state would likely experience a marked increase, the petitioners said.
In September, the three judges overturned a lower court’s 2011 ruling. The panel said that “California’s regulatory experiment” seeking to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions and create a market that recognizes the harmful costs of products with a high carbon intensity does not “facially discriminate against out-of-state ethanol.”
“California should be encouraged to continue and to expand its efforts to find a workable solution to lower carbon emissions, or to slow their rise,” the panel said.
