BEN CHRISTOPHER
California’s environmental regulators have been on a tear lately. Late last month, the California Air Resources Board introduced a new rule banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in California, starting in 2035.
This week, the board turned its regulatory gaze to the state’s fleet of big-rigs.
As CalMatters’ environment reporter Nadia Lopez writes, California aims to phase out the use of fossil-fuel burning medium- and heavy-duty trucks. The deadline: 2040.
Transportation is the state’s largest source of planet-warming emissions and trucks make up about a quarter of those tailpipe emissions nationwide. In addition, they’re also a prime source of smog and asthma-causing particulates that disproportionately choke the air of low-income neighborhoods in California.
California prides itself on being first to roll out aggressive climate policies and this is a worldwide first. That has truckers worried.
- California Trucking Association’s Chris Shimoda: “We’re flying blind into some pretty major questions about the practicality of actually implementing this rule.”
Not that California is short on aggressive climate policies. Today, Newsom says he will sign a package of bills that a press release referred to as “some of the nation’s most aggressive climate measures in history.”
The signing ceremony in Solano County will be “clean energy-powered,” no less.
Among the bills Newsom is expected to sign are the four climate and energy bills that he pitched to the Legislature in the final weeks of the session this year.
- AB 1279 will put into state law the existing policy goal of reaching statewide “carbon neutrality” by 2045.
- SB 1020 will set benchmarks that the state electric grid has to hit before sourcing all of its power from renewable sources by 2045.
- SB 905 will require the Air Resources Board to come up with regulations for projects that capture, reuse and store carbon emissions.
- SB 1137 will ban the drilling of any new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, nursing homes and hospitals, effectively banning the activity from most developed areas in the state.
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Has anyone told these guys that the weight of lugging all those batteries around makes EV’s throw off more air pollution from their tires than they save from not having a tailpipe? And what’s going to happen to all that energy that restaurants used to throw away and now get stolen to feed diesels? Go back to paying to dispose of perfectly good energy, instead of getting use out of it with “mobile liquid garbage incinerators.”