The New Yorker:

If Donald Trump had come to California earlier this week, and found smog conditions similar to those that prevailed here only a few decades ago, it’s easy to imagine what he would have done: tweeted about the “Sad Dem Smog!” and promptly set up an e-commerce site selling MAGA-branded catalytic converters and air filters.

Instead, Trump, who on Tuesday held fund-raisers in Silicon Valley and Beverly Hills, enacted a different form of eco-trolling, when he promised on Wednesday to cite San Francisco for the environmental damage that its homeless population has caused. On a roll, the following day, he made good on a yearlong threat to deny California the right to continue setting its own, more stringent tailpipe-emissions standards, which the state has had since Nixon first granted it the authority, as part of the Clean Air Act, in 1970. In a joint statement by the E.P.A. and the Department of Transportation, the Trump Administration also withdrew permission for California to require carmakers to offer zero-emissions vehicles, a prerogative enshrined in Obama’s 2013 Clean Air Act. Back then, the mandate was designed to stimulate innovation, for our collective salvation; in these dark ages of retrograde, reactionary American climate policy, it served only to provoke a gaslighting, gas-loving President who’s determined to turn back time.

On Friday, California, as it has become accustomed to doing, sued the Administration in an effort to preserve the state’s legacy rights surrounding emissions standards and clean vehicles. (Twenty-three other states and three cities joined the suit, which was filed in federal court in D.C.) “The environment is California’s foreign policy,” Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, told me on Thursday, as the complaint was being finalized. “It’s where we assert ourselves on the international stage, not just the national stage.” This is the sixtieth lawsuit that California has filed against the Trump Administration and, according to Newsom, by far the most consequential. “We have the law on our side, we have the facts on our side, we have science on our side, and we have moral authority—not just the formal authority—to fight back,” he told me.

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