Ever since the 1950s, when a man sold fresh clean desert air for 50 cents a balloonfull in front of Loew’s State Theatre, Angelenos have associated smog with automobiles — with good reason. But autos — and trucks — were never the only source of smog. If auto pollution was easier to see and easier to tackle early on, stationary sources have always contributed significantly as well. And on July 2, a federal appeals court upheld the most consequential rule of its kind: A zero-emission NOx rule for boilers and water heaters, that will reduce NOx, a smog precursor, by 5.6 tons per day, the equivalent of half the automobiles in the region.
“Today, we secured a huge victory for clean air in the nation’s smog capital,” said Candice Youngblood, an attorney with Earthjustice, representing three groups who intervened in the case. “The courts have rejected a cynical effort to stop one of the Los Angeles region’s most significant air pollution reduction rules in decades.”
“Inland Empire communities are getting crushed by air pollution, and this ruling provides a breath of fresh air to make our communities safer,” said Gem Montes, policy analyst and advocate at People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, one of the groups represented by Earth Justice.
The ruling benefits “environmental justice communities in the LA area as well,” Youngblood told Random Lengths.
“This is the first all zero-emission rule we’ve adopted, and the second highest reductions achieved from a rule in the past decade,” said Vanessa Delgado, the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s governing board chair when the rule was adopted on July 7, 2024. “Not only is this a huge step towards improving air quality for our communities, it will have tremendous public health benefits.”
More than 2,800 early deaths and 11,800 cases of asthma will be prevented, and $95 billion saved, according to AQMD’s analysis.
History of The Case
The rule — an updated version of AQMD’s Rule 1146.2, first introduced in 1998 — was adopted as part of AQMD’s 2022 Air Quality Management Plan, designed to meet federal standards under the Clean Air Act, which requires a total NOx reduction of about 60 tons per day.
But it was challenged by gas industry allies on December 5, 2024, who argued that the rule violated the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA), which sets national energy efficiency standards, preempting stricter state or local regulations.
On July 22, 2025, the federal district court ruled that “EPCA Does Not Preempt Rule 1146.2,” simply stating that “The Rule addresses the pollution appliances emit and not their energy use.”
That ruling was appealed, but on July 2, a three-judge appeal panel affirmed the district court decision, saying, “Notably absent from the text and legislative history of EPCA is any mention of appliance emissions standards.”
In short, EPCA and the Clean Air Act do not conflict in this case. Earthjustice put it simply in its brief:
“The Boiler Rule does not concern energy use at all. It regulates emissions, without respect to how much energy equipment may consume, just as previous iterations of the District’s Boiler Rule have done for decades. It thus falls outside the reach of EPCA preemption.”
But it’s not just this case.
“We’ve seen that these types of rules that reduce smog-forming pollution have been adopted by air districts across the country,” Youngblood said. “And so the court ruling in favor of the air district is really affirming that states and localities do have the authority to adopt these lifesaving regulations and that nothing in EPCA indicates that Congress intended to disrupt the Clean Air Act regulatory scheme.”
She called attention to an amicus brief where “35 other jurisdictions were identified that had adopted similar types of regulations for appliances across the country.” The brief (from the Northeast States For Coordinated Air Use Management) noted that regulations “exist on a spectrum from low-NOx, to ultra-low-NOx, to zero-NOx in stringency, but all are of the same essential character: They require covered appliances to operate differently in order to meet emission standards, and they frequently induce changes in the energy use of covered appliances as a side effect of compliance.”
The list was presented to show that the AQMD’s rule was hardly unusual so far as the law is concerned, but it also showed how much damage would be done if the court had ruled the other way, and similar rules could be struck down.
A Misleading Precursor
“This lawsuit is straight out of the gas industry’s playbook, using the same law firms and front groups to do their dirty work and force Californians to rely on a polluting product,” Youngblood said when Earthjustice first intervened in the case.
Specifically, she told Random Lengths, she was thinking of an earlier case, California Restaurant Association v. City of Berkeley, brought by the same lawsuit on behalf of many of the same clients, including the CRA. But that case involved a city building code banning natural gas infrastructure in newly-constructed buildings, where the Clean Air Act wasn’t directly involved.
While the industry groups claimed that case as a precedent, the latest ruling “reiterates again and again it was a very narrow opinion that was specific to facts of that case,” Youngblood said. “The Ninth Circuit [court] recognized the limitations of that opinion and that it did not apply to the facts here.”
Instead, the decision focused on the legislative history of EPCA and its relationship to the Clean Air Act, which was first enacted five years before EPCA, which “was enacted in the aftermath of the oil embargo against the US by certain countries in the ’70s” to help reduce reliance on overseas oil, Youngblood explained. “When it was first enacted, EPCA was primarily focused on labeling specific consumer appliances and then over time it came to entail these other energy conservation, energy efficiency programs,” she said.
But even though both acts were amended over time, “Nothing in the text or the legislative history of EPCA indicated that Congress intended to disrupt the Clean Air Act’s regulatory scheme,” she stressed. “The relationship between the two is at the crux of the case.”
Or, put another way, “The crux of this case is that an incidental effect on energy is not the same as what EPCA is intended to regulate.”
