The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved California’s plan to phase out and ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and light trucks by 2035. The EPA gave California the waiver it needed to implement the Advanced Clean Cars II regulation (ACC II), which was drafted and approved by the California Air Resources Board, in 2022, ABC News reported.
The EPA also approved California’s plan to reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from heavy-duty vehicles to reduce the amount of smog in the air. The state will require an initial 75 percent reduction in NOx pollution, followed by a 90 percent reduction a few years later.
ACC II provides a year-by-year blueprint for phasing out sales of combustion-engine vehicles. The plan sets a 2026 deadline by which 35 percent of the state’s car sales must be electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids or models with hydrogen fuel cells.
Then by 2030, the electric vehicle sales threshold rises to 68 percent, reaching its final 100 percent sales requirement by 2035. Consumers and dealerships will still be able to buy, sell and drive used ICE and hybrid cars until ACC II. Liane Randolph, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, estimated that ACC II could reduce pollution by 50 percent by 2040.
California Governor Gavin Newsom praised the decision and ACC II in a statement, calling it proof that “California can rise to the challenge of protecting its people by cleaning up its air and reducing pollution.”
As the post points out, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has some important information that could be very useful to another country’s government. While the hackers were only able to steal unclassified data, they could still get their hands on the identities of potential sanctions targets.
They could also steal evidence that the agency had collected as part of its investigations on entities the government is thinking of imposing sanctions on. Overall, the attackers could have gotten enough information to give them insight into how the US enforces sanctions against foreign entities.
Apart from OFAC, the Office of the Treasury Secretary and the Office of Financial Research were also affected by the breach. The attackers infiltrated Treasury’s systems by gaining access to a key used by BeyondTrust, a cloud-based service that provides technical support to the department.
The US government has blamed China’s state-sponsored actors for several cyberattacks on its agencies and US companies in the past few years. Just last year, the FBI blamed “PRC-linked actors” for a massive hack on US telecommunications companies.
The actors, a group known as Salt Typhoon, reportedly targeted the mobile devices of diplomats, government officials and others associated with both presidential campaigns. According to The Post, Chinese officials called the claim that their country was involved in the attack on the Treasury Department “groundless,” and stressed that their government “has always opposed all forms of hacker attacks.”