California regulators voted to ban new diesel big rig sales by 2036 and mandate that they all be zero-emission vehicles by 2042.
The state already has some of the strictest truck emission laws in the nation.
According to a report from the Daily Caller, “The California Air Resources Board (CARB) finalized the Advanced Clean Fleet rule, which would mandate that 50% of all state and local government vehicle fleet purchases be 50% zero-emissions by 2024, and 100% by 2027, and create a registry for drayage trucks. The rule — which comes one day after the board voted to implement the state’s first-ever rules to limit train emissions — would go even further than recent California rules approved by President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency, which would cut diesel truck sales in half by 2035.”
Chris Shimoda, senior vice president of the California Trucking Association, told local station KRON4 that the consequences of these rules will be “chaos and dysfunction” like “nothing we’ve ever seen before.”
“The amount of chaos and dysfunction that is going to be created by this rule will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Shimoda.“The likelihood that it is going to fail pretty spectacularly is very high. It’s very unfortunate.”
The report added that “trucking companies and local government officials call the deadlines in the rule unachievable. They say the new technology still has major drawbacks, including the high cost of electric trucks and their low vehicle range. The state also has not yet developed a charging network to support electric trucks, and the existing chargers can take hours to recharge, industry officials say.”
The U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon fleets are among those which will be highly impacted by the new rules.
Shimoda warned that this will lead to another disastrous supply chain crisis.
“If the rule moves forward and is implemented the way that it’s written today, you are going to see a lot of the same problems that we had during the pandemic, but we created the problem,” Shimoda said. “It’s a supply chain crisis of our own making.”