(Just The News)—A Supreme Court ruling Friday re-opened a challenge to California’s greenhouse gas emissions regulations and electric vehicle requirements by recognizing that fuel producers have standing to make their case against the rules.
The ruling notes the Advanced Clean Cars I EV requirements in question have been adopted at least in part by 17 states and the District of Columbia, and are in effect through vehicle model year 2025, which for many automakers is already over, while the GHG emissions regulations are indefinite.
With the new ruling remanding the case back to district court, the GHG regulations are set to face a renewed challenge from fuel producers, who have argued the rules will reduce demand for their products.
Advanced Clean Cars II, which was supposed to take effect for model year 2026, was recently overturned after President Donald Trump signed a resolution passed by Congress. Lawmakers used the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency waiver allowing the regulation to take place.
California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom has since ordered the state to continue enforcing the Advanced Clean Cars II standard, an act that could violate federal law.
Federal law generally preempts state law. But under the Clean Air Act, California was granted the ability to set its own emissions regulations, as the air quality regulations to combat the state’s notorious and toxic smog predated the EPA.
The ruling outlines the history of the EPA waivers, which have to be granted for each California standard that is more stringent than the federal standard. They are supposed to be granted only to meet “compelling and extraordinary conditions.”
“Beginning in 2005, California also attempted to use its unique preemption exception as one means to address global climate change,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the official court opinion. “In 2008, under the George W. Bush administration, EPA denied California’s first such request.”
“EPA explained that the Clean Air Act permits California to enact standards to address local and regional pollution where the causal factors are tied to California,” continued Kavanaugh. “But EPA reasoned that the authority granted to California did not extend to efforts to combat global climate change.”
The regulations the fuel producers are challenging were first approved by the Obama administration’s EPA in 2013 and reversed under the first Trump administration in 2019. The rules were re-approved by the Biden administration in 2022, after which the producers filed their case in the District of Columbia.
The producers argued “the regulations did not target a local California air-quality problem – as they say is required by the Clean Air Act – but instead were designed to address global climate change.”
California defended the waiver and sought to intervene, focusing on the importance of selling fewer gasoline-powered vehicles, and selling more electric vehicles. After its motion to intervene was approved, allowing California to be added as a party to the lawsuit, the state’s argument changed course. California said the producers lacked standing because “surging consumer demand” for electric vehicles meant that reversing the regulations would not result in the production of more gasoline-powered vehicles.
The D.C. Circuit sided with California, holding the producers did not have standing, leading to the appeal to the Supreme Court, and now ruling that the producers do have standing to pursue their lawsuit.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separate dissenting opinions.
Sotomayor argued the Supreme Court overreached by deciding on the issue of standing, and that the court should have only ruled on the factual error regarding the fact that some of the regulations extend beyond model year 2025, and thus create redresseable issues for producers.
Sotomayor also noted that it’s likely the Trump administration will withdraw the challenged rules.
Jackson’s dissent included many of the same arguments made by Sotomayor, but focused more on the reputational damage to the court from selectively granting standing to producers, while often failing to grant standing to citizens against the government.
“If the Court privileges the interests of one class of litigants over others, even unintentionally, it can damage Americans’ faith in an impartial Judiciary and undermine the long-term credibility of its judgments,” wrote Jackson. “Time will tell if today’s decision portends a broader shift in the Court’s view of Article III standing for all litigants.
“If it does not, and if the Court is not fastidious in maintaining consistency across its certiorari decisions and substantive rulings, its decisions will come to represent, like so many marble façades, another mere facsimile of justice,” concluded Jackson.
American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a plaintiff in the case, celebrated the ruling as the opportunity to make their case against California’s regulations in court.
“Today the Supreme Court put to rest any question about whether fuel manufacturers have a right to challenge unlawful electric vehicle mandates,” said Chet Thompson, AFPM President and CEO, in a statement to The Center Square. “We do, and we look forward to finally having our day in court.”
“Congress did not give California special authority to regulate greenhouse gases, mandate electric vehicles or ban new gas car sales — all of which the state has attempted to do through its intentional misreading of statute,” continued Thompson.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
