‘love Letter’: California Ag Takes Aim At Trump’s Links To Big Oil

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is angling for a high-profile legal fight with the president that he says could derail the administration’s sweeping effort to gut climate regulations.

The Democrat has led lawsuits to stop the Trump administration from canceling offshore wind projects, withholding clean energy funding and eliminating hallmark climate pollution rules. His biggest test is a likely Supreme Court matchup.

Bonta is gearing up to argue against the administration’s attempt to undercut federal responsibility for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

“Can we guarantee it? No,” Bonta said on the POLITICO Energy podcast, referring to a Supreme Court win. “But we are confident because we have the facts and the law on our side.”

California is leading the multistate lawsuit against the EPA’s move to revoke the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases are a danger to human health. That finding is the foundation for the federal climate regulations that President Donald Trump is attempting to revoke, including the EPA rule limiting carbon dioxide from power plants that the agency axed this month.

The high court has changed since it required the agency to issue an endangerment finding nearly 20 years ago. Back then, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a scathing dissent in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA, and was joined by justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Now they’re in the majority, after Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices.

“There were fears that the U.S. Supreme Court was gonna do Trump's bidding and never find for California, even if we had the facts and law on our side. And you know, we have won at the U.S. Supreme Court on key centerpiece policies of the Trump administration,” Bonta said, citing victories on the state’s redistricting plan and preventing federal deployment of National Guard troops.

Many of Trump’s environmental fights are still brewing. His administration has restarted oil and gas development off California’s coast and paid offshore wind developers billions of dollars to abandon their leases. Bonta’s office filed a lawsuit Tuesday over Trump’s handling of offshore wind.

Trump’s most direct shot is aimed at Sacramento’s ability to exceed federal limits on vehicle emissions. The Clean Air Act lets California set tougher restrictions through a waiver process to deal with its persistent smog pollution. That policy would help the state achieve its goal of banning new sales of vehicles with internal combustion engines by 2035.

Trump is trying to undermine that target. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin reclassified those waivers as a rule, which he sent to Congress to nullify through the Congressional Review Act. A federal court ruled that it’s illegal, and EPA has appealed.

“It is undisputed under the law that a waiver is an order and it's not a rule and it's not subject to the Congressional Review Act,” Bonta said. “So we'll take that to any court.”

Whether Californians support the state’s EV goal is another matter. More than half of likely voters — 54 percent — said they oppose the 2035 ban on new gas-powered car sales, according to a POLITICO poll. A leading candidate for governor, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat who’s running to fill the open seat left by the upcoming departure of Gov. Gavin Newsom, has cast doubt on the goal. But Becerra says he believes it is still within reach.

Bonta dismissed concerns that California’s climate policies are at odds with voters’ concerns about cost of living.

“California is gonna be California,” he said. “I don't think we're out of touch. I think we lead.”

Instead, Bonta argued that Trump’s policies have stoked affordability problems. He rejected Trump’s claims that clean energy is more expensive, saying that ignoring climate change imposes costs related to things like wildfires and floods. Tariffs and the war with Iran have also spiked prices, including for gas, he said.

Bonta also challenged Trump’s relationships with the fossil fuel industry and corporations, accusing him of failing to enforce antitrust laws.

“Trump has been writing an ongoing love letter, or at least attempting to, to the fossil fuel industry, writing different chapters and different verses and trying to provide them giveaways time and time again,” he said.

Bonta was recently at the center of a different antitrust dispute. California and 11 other states settled their lawsuit over Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this month, after warning that the combined companies’ size would quash competition in the media industry. A federal judge has paused the settlement from moving forward.

Bonta said Paramount addressed the state’s complaints — about theater releases for films and cable channel licensing — and argued that the settlement did not mean he was shying away from taking actions against corporations.

“The progressive movement is a big tent,” he said. “There are many issues and many subject matter areas and many policy areas. We're not all going to agree on everything and that's part of the beauty of having a big tent.”