Q&A: California’s long-time clean air cop talks Trump, China and EVs

Mary Nichols, the former chair of the California Air Resources Board, fought many battles over the course of her 15-plus years as the head of the state’s powerful regulatory body.

During her first term, CARB demanded carmakers install catalytic converters to neutralize air pollutants. From 2016 to 2020, she fended off the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke California’s right under the Clean Air Act to set its own air-quality standards.

In 2020, Nichols’ last year as chair of CARB, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035. The move has yet to be blessed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and has come under attack from Republicans critical of EV mandates. If former president Donald Trump is victorious in November, another emissions fight between California and the federal government is likely.

An environmental lawyer by trade, Nichols is now teaching at UCLA and working on a memoir to encourage young environmental activists to keep their hopes high. She drives a Ford Mustang Mach-E and hasn’t lost any of her fighting spirit.

We spoke on the sidelines of SAFE Summit, a conference that’s drawn investors, policymakers and executives from the auto, battery and mining industries to Washington this week to opine on electrification and the west’s economic competition with China. Here are the highlights from the conversation, which are edited and condensed for length and clarity:

The U.S. auto industry is grappling with a lot of uncertainty around EV demand. We’ve seen hybrids do really well  — Toyota has been beating that drum for a while — while GM and Ford went headlong into BEVs and have  stumbled badly .

They have not stumbled badly! [pounds table] They haven’t sold as much as they wanted to, and they got in some trouble with some of their investors, but they are on a path that they’re going to continue on, and the world will be electric — maybe a few years later.

In California, car sales are trending more toward EVs all the time, and they're picking up in other places, not quite as fast as it was predicted, but pretty damn quick for a big revolutionary change in technology.

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