The Trump administration’s efforts to bend California to its will on a variety of fronts have been mixed at best. Last week, for example, a panel of judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed yet again that federal funding to state law enforcement agencies couldn’t be linked to their assistance in deporting illegal immigrants. Judges have ruled for the state and against the federal government in cases involving other immigration issues and environmental policies.

But the White House can claim a substantial win on vehicle emissions. Last week, many of the largest automakers in the world sided with President Donald Trump in his view that it’s not good for the U.S. economy for the nation’s largest state to have tougher rules on vehicle emissions and miles per gallon than those set by the federal government.

General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia and Fiat Chrysler are backing Trump’s attempt to end the waiver that California has had for more than 50 years allowing it to set tougher standards on emissions for vehicles sold in the state. Twelve other states – Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington – have adopted the Golden State’s rules.

The fight was triggered by the Trump administration’s decision to scrap rules set by President Barack Obama that required automakers to have their vehicles average 55 miles per gallon by 2025. This led California Gov. Gavin Newsom to reach out to automakers to seek their voluntary compliance with tougher standards, winning support in July from Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and BMW for a plan under which their fleets would average 50 miles per gallon by 2026 – weaker than what Obama wanted but much tougher than Trump’s rules, which would set 37 miles per gallon as the industry standard.

Newsom said then that he was “very confident” other automakers would accept California’s standards. Instead, the largest automakers in the U.S., Japan and South Korea have sided with Trump in filing arguments with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which is considering a lawsuit from California and 22 other states seeking to uphold the Obama administration’s fuel-efficiency rules.

The automakers and the National Automobile Dealers Association said that they needed “the certainty that states cannot interfere with federal fuel economy standards.”

Newsom, Brown decry Trump’s global warming skepticism

Obama, Newsom and most climate scientists see requiring higher gas mileage standards as the easiest way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that build up in the atmosphere and cause global warming. Vehicle emissions in recent years have passed power plant emissions as the single biggest generator of greenhouse gases.

Trump rejects the conventional wisdom about greenhouse gases. As the New York Times reported Saturday, he has “directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back nearly every federal policy designed to curb the heat-trapping fossil-fuel pollution that is the chief cause of global warming.”

In the report, Newsom told the Times that the state’s recent history of devastating wildfires was directly related to climate change.

“We’re waging war against the most destructive fires in our state’s history, and Trump is conducting a full-on assault against the antidote,” Newsom said.

Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, framed the issue even more dramatically in testimony to Congress last week.

“The seas are rising, diseases are spreading, fires are burning, hundreds of thousands of people are leaving their homes,” he said. “California is burning while the deniers fight the standards that can help us all. This is life-and-death stuff.”

Over the past dozen years, the California environmental lobby has never seemed more powerful in the Legislature and in state government. Under Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, the Golden State has passed

But a bracing report from the California Air Resources Board shows that environmentalists’ clout can’t shake the complete control that NIMBYs have over local planning in most of the state – to the detriment of the environment. It found that a 2008 state law – Senate Bill 375 – had been an abject failure. The law requires the state’s 18 regional intergovernmental agencies to push to put new housing near transit stations and to add new transportation options so as to decrease pollution from vehicle commuting.

Not only are three out of four workers still commuting alone to work, carpooling and transit ridership are down. As a result, vehicle greenhouse gas emissions have actually risen in recent years – and the decline from 2007-2011 seems likely to have been a function of the Great Recession, not the state push to reduce emissions associated with climate change.

The air board sees no chance that the SB375 goal of reducing statewide vehicle emissions 10 percent by 2020 will be met.

The report was met with dismay by environmental groups and journalists concerned with progress against climate change. The most common response to the air board’s finding was the call for the Legislature to take more steps to limit the ability of local governments to block projects that met certain criteria – starting with being near transit stations.

69% of Californians want local control of housing

But the appetite of state lawmakers to take on NIMBYs may be limited in the wake of new evidence that NIMBYism isn’t just espoused by activists who see every new housing project as detrimental to quality of life. Instead, it’s a core belief of state residents. A USC Dornsrife/Los Angeles Times survey released in October showed 69 percent of Californians preferred local control of housing decision-making.

And the fate of a bill to reduce local control over housing showed that even poor people – those who in theory would be most helped by adding housing stock, which likely would push down sky-high rents – are skeptical.

Senate Bill 827, by Sen. Scott Weiner, D-San Francisco, would have made it much easier to build four- or five-story apartment buildings within a half-mile of transit centers. The prospect of apartment buildings springing up in poor neighborhoods with single-family homes – such as in the Los Angeles County cities of Inglewood and Carson – led to an outraged reaction from 36 housing and transit “justice groups” led by the Alliance for Community Transit – Los Angeles (ACT-LA). Instead of seeing the bill as leading to cheaper housing, these groups saw it as likely to lead to home renters being ousted in favor of more lucrative apartment buildings, and to new waves of gentrification.

The opposition to Weiner’s bill from activists and from local governments – including every member of the Los Angeles City Council – was so intense that SB827 died at its first committee hearing in April.

Weiner has since met with ACT-LA leaders and other activists and plans to reintroduce SB827 next year with provisions that address concerns that poor neighborhoods would be upended by much laxer housing rules. But such provisions could end up leading to trading old rules giving local governments power to limit construction for new rules with similar effects.