A federal judge late Wednesday temporarily blocked a Trump administration effort to overturn California’s clean car rules through Congress.
Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of former President Obama, blocked an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) move that would have allowed Congress and President Trump to overturn California rules related to vehicle and lawn equipment emissions.
In years past, the EPA allowed these regulations to move forward by granting waivers that exempted them from the Clean Air Act’s preemption of state laws that are stricter than federal standards.
In June, the agency classified these waivers as “rules,“ an effort to let Congress overturn them using the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows lawmaker to nix recently passed rules with simple majority votes and presidential approval.
“The central problem for EPA is that the waivers themselves explicitly state that they are not rules, while the CRA limits invocation of this statute only to agency rules of general applicability, which EPA, in its own words, has emphatically stated Clean Air Act waiver orders are not,” Howell wrote in her ruling.
Environmental Glance
Severe flash flooding in the Grand Canyon on Saturday caused significant damage to infrastructure, forced the evacuation of over 60 people and has left more than a dozen missing.
About 85 Americans remain missing after a devastating flood swept through a remote region of the Nepali Himalayas, the State Department said on Sunday.
A fire in California’s Big Sur region doubled in size overnight, forcing the evacuation of nearby residents, in a coastal region where firefighters have battled another blaze for weeks.
At least 359 people have died, and nearly 1,000 others are reported missing after a flash flood struck a mountainous area in Nepal and the Tibet region of China on Aug. 26.
Afast-growing wildfire forced over 42,000 people to evacuate near Reno, Nevada, over the weekend, while more than 40,000 others remained under evacuation warnings.
Today's floods come after a week of storms in the region.





























