California Contemplates Ban On Diesel Trucks

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The California Air Resources Board is proposing a plan that would phase out diesel trucks. According to SF Gate, the proposed regulations would prohibit the use of new diesel trucks in and around busy railways and ports by 2024, phase out all diesel trucks from those areas by 2035, and — where feasible — remove every diesel truck and bus fleet from California roads by 2045.

“Many California neighborhoods — especially Black and Brown, low income, and vulnerable communities — live, work, play and attend schools adjacent to the ports, railyards, distribution centers, and freight corridors and experience the heaviest truck traffic,” the board wrote when the new proposal was first introduced in 2020. It added that the pollution from diesel trucks causes significant health risks to those communities.

At a recent public hearing on the proposal, supporters and opponents had plenty to say. SF Gate reports more than 150 members of the public were on hand to voice their opinions about the proposal. Many representing the trucking and construction industries said that there simply isn’t enough charging capability or grid capacity in the state to move fleets over to zero emission vehicles so quickly.

“The infrastructure cannot be established in the time frame given,” said Mike Tunnell of the American Trucking Association. “Fleets will have to deploy trucks that cannot do the same job as their current trucks.”

Others pointed to logistical problems in charging electric trucks. “This will do damage to us. We don’t really understand how to charge these vehicles,” said construction company CEO Jaimie Angus. “Those pieces of equipment go home with those men every day, so they’ll need to be charged from home? How do you compensate that person for that?”

Meanwhile, environmentalists, including a representative from the Sierra Club, urged that the timeline should be moved up to rid the roads of diesel trucks sooner rather than later. Currently, fewer than 2,000 medium and heavy duty vehicles in California are zero emission, and the vast majority of them are buses, reports Cal Matters. The next public hearing will take place next spring.

The Diesel Trucks Dilemma

All of the people who commented on the CARB proposal are right. Diesel trucks do pollute and that pollution disproportionately affects low income neighborhoods. Largely that is because people with money choose not to live in those areas, which means property values are lower, which means only lower income people can afford to live there.

One of the issues that is inextricably bound up in all discussions about curbing emissions is social justice. Reactionaries prefer to ignore the problem or to attack low income people for being poor, but the demographics of communities most affected by fossil fuel pollution — whether in California or in the oil and chemical zones of Texas and Louisiana — show wealthy people don’t build McMansions next door to industrial areas. Most of those who do are people of color and you can draw your own conclusions about why that might be so.

On the other hand, virtually every item on the shelves at Walmart and Kroger, every item that Amazon sells and delivers to your door, and every item hauled away to dumps and landfills is transported by diesel-powered machines, either diesel trucks, diesel ships, or diesel trains. The modern world is a slave to diesel power. Changing that will necessarily involve severe disruptions of the economy. The transition to clean transportation will be hard, but it is absolutely necessary.

The Earth is getting hotter, largely due to the emissions created by extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. If it gets too hot, humans will no longer be able to survive on our little blue lifeboat at the far edge of a minor galaxy.

The answer is that we must stop burning fossil fuels. Full stop. End of argument. If we don’t, most of us will be dead and our heirs will never be born. As John F. Kennedy said, “We do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

The world was treated to the fiasco at COP 27 in Egypt this week where the oil producing nations fought to torpedo efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels. We can continue to pump all the oil we can find, they argued, and still prevent a climate disaster. That’s a lie told by those who are too afraid of the future to take responsible action for the sake of all humanity. If we continue doing what we have always done, the Earth will still be around for billions of years but humans won’t be alive much longer to enjoy it.

The transition will be bumpy. Fortunes will be lost. But the price of inaction is too high to even contemplate. The best estimate is that it will take an investment of $2 trillion a year to confront the climate emergency effectively. Some tremble at the idea of spending that much money. They run around screaming about how we can’t afford it. Yet the United States spent that much to punish Afghanistan after 9/11. It’s just a matter of priorities.

What CARB is proposing will be hard. But as Socrates taught us 3000 years ago, “The secret to change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.” Let’s get on with it.


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Steve Hanley

Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Florida or anywhere else The Force may lead him. He is proud to be "woke" and doesn't really give a damn why the glass broke. He believes passionately in what Socrates said 3000 years ago: "The secret to change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new." You can follow him on Substack and LinkedIn but not on Fakebook or any social media platforms controlled by narcissistic yahoos.

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