California has been pushing hard recently to lose its status as the second-largest contributor of the nation’s greenhouse gases (still comfortably behind Texas.)
In 2020, the California Air Resources Board (“CARB”) enacted the Advanced Clean Trucks (“ACT”) rule, the world’s first zero-emissions commercial truck requirement. Specifically, ACT required large-capacity vehicle (truck) manufacturers to phase out gasoline and diesel trucks, which account for the largest single source of pollution in the world’s fifth-largest economy, by replacing them with ever-larger volumes of vehicles with zero emissions. By the numbers, 75 percent of trucks over 14,000 lbs. need to be emissions-free by 2035, with 100 percent of the fleet getting there by 2045.
In 2022, CARB took it further by enacting a regulation requiring 100 percent of all new sales to be zero-emission vehicles (“ZEV”) by 2035.
Because these standards exceed those mandated by the U.S. government in the Clean Air Act (“CAA”), California has been required to seek a waiver so that the ACT is not pre-empted by them. On Friday, March 31, the EPA granted California the waiver to enforce the ACT, giving it the mandate needed to pursue one of the most aggressive anti-pollution agendas in commercial trucking since the advent of modern transportation.
Understandably, this sea change was not without opposition.
“The state and federal regulators collaborating on this unrealistic patchwork of regulations have no grasp on the real costs of designing, building, manufacturing and operating the trucks that deliver their groceries, clothes and goods,” said Chris Spear, president of the American Trucking Association, in a statement.
While predictable, Spear’s critique about the impracticability of the ACT is not unfounded; only 2 percent of heavy trucks sold in the United States in 2022 were electric.