BATON ROUGE, LA – Today, Governor Jeff Landry, Chairman of the Governors Coalition for Energy Security (GCES), criticized the decision by the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to grant California a waiver to implement its deeply flawed, unpopular and punitive plan to ban the sale of new gas and diesel automobiles by 2035.
“The California car ban the Biden EPA has enabled is exactly the kind of policy that led us to form the GCES in the first place: to protect our citizens from decisions that reduce their freedom of choice, increase their energy costs and decrease their economic opportunities,” Gov. Landry said. “The Biden Administration clearly has not heard the message Americans sent in the last election, rejecting greater government imposition into their lives and policies that only serve to increase the cost of living. No one has been elected with a mandate to force Americans to change how they drive, eat and live their lives, let alone to increase their cost of living to satisfy ideological whims that serve no one well. California is witnessing an unprecedented exodus of citizens and businesses precisely because its leaders have imposed those kind of mandates – and we are determined to keep that contagion out of our states.”
Background:
The EPA granted a waiver sought by California to put its Advanced Clean Cars II rule in action, which mandates that a specific percentage of vehicles sold in the state be electric, increasing until the sale of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles are de facto outlawed in 2035.
Eleven other states have adopted the California standard and are poised to put it into place, affecting 35% of the nation’s population, whether they prefer it or not.
