California Drops Its Pending Zero-Emission Truck Rules (msn.com) 61
In 2022 California's Air Resources Board issued regulations to ban new diesel truck sales by 2036, remembers the Los Angeles Times, and force the owners of diesel trucks to take them off the road by 2042. "The idea was to replace those trucks with electric and hydrogen-powered versions, which dramatically reduce emissions but are currently two to three times more expensive."
But it would've required a federal waiver to enforce those rules — which isn't going to happen: The Biden administration hadn't granted the waivers as of this week, and rather than face almost certain denial by the incoming Trump administration, the state withdrew its waiver request... Trucking representatives had filed a lawsuit to block the rules, arguing they would cause irreparable harm to the industry and the wider economy.
The nonprofit news site CalMatters notes the withdrawal "comes after the Biden administration recently approved the California Air Resources Board's mandate phasing out new gas-powered cars by 2035, but had not yet approved other waivers for four diesel vehicle standards that the state has adopted... California may have to suspend any future rule-making for vehicles over the next four years of the Trump administration and rely instead on voluntary agreements with engine manufacturers, trucking companies, railroads and other industries."
The Los Angeles Times adds that California "could, however, pursue waivers at some point in the future." Under America's federal Clean Air Act, "California is allowed to set its own air standards, and other states are allowed to follow California's lead. But federal government waivers are required..."
But it would've required a federal waiver to enforce those rules — which isn't going to happen: The Biden administration hadn't granted the waivers as of this week, and rather than face almost certain denial by the incoming Trump administration, the state withdrew its waiver request... Trucking representatives had filed a lawsuit to block the rules, arguing they would cause irreparable harm to the industry and the wider economy.
The nonprofit news site CalMatters notes the withdrawal "comes after the Biden administration recently approved the California Air Resources Board's mandate phasing out new gas-powered cars by 2035, but had not yet approved other waivers for four diesel vehicle standards that the state has adopted... California may have to suspend any future rule-making for vehicles over the next four years of the Trump administration and rely instead on voluntary agreements with engine manufacturers, trucking companies, railroads and other industries."
The Los Angeles Times adds that California "could, however, pursue waivers at some point in the future." Under America's federal Clean Air Act, "California is allowed to set its own air standards, and other states are allowed to follow California's lead. But federal government waivers are required..."
Term Limits (Score:1, Troll)
Trump won't be around in 2036, and if he did declare himself Emperor for life, California wouldn't be the only state to leave.
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Because *I* live in a state that voted in the retard I want to seceed from, but don't have the money to move to California, and would rather the racist assholes leave MY state instead of vice-versa. Oh yeah, the reason I don't have the $$? Because republicans decided to hinder IT instead of a failing and prominiently wealth-concentrated Ag-Producer being allowed to decline in an area now hit by more climate change disasters, they propped up the Ag industry, and passed laws to prevent other industries from
Re: Term Limits (Score:1)
A fatso in his 80's that lives on cheeseburgers won't get to be 90. But maybe he will pass his Presidency down to an heir.
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I thought it was trending with billionaires to get blood transfusions from their children and grand children, like some kind of freaking ghoul.
Things are going to get especially weird when the singularity comes and we're either ruled by some immortal elders or the AI they lost control of. Luckily for Trump, he's not going to have to face any of those consequences of that very likely future.
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Maybe he uses one of those goa'uld sarcophagi. Would explain the megalomania and intense notions of superiority...
Tine for Environment Annie again (Score:3, Funny)
The battery tech just isn't there (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get me wrong EV trucks are absolutely fantastic for a lot of use cases. City governments love them when they can afford them because you don't have to spend time and money putting gas in a vehicle the end of the day and you're really just making a lot of short drives around fixing things like the sprinkler systems at your parks and recs. I can see the post office loving EV vans for although I think the current administration is going to stop the deployment of them.
But at least right now if you need to tow stuff long distances, which is a very common use case, an electric truck doesn't cut it.
And then you're left with the same problem 3D TVs have where a substantial portion of your user base can't use your product and so you can't take advantage of economies of scale properly.
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For class 8 trucks if you have the charging infrastructure on place, electric is viable. There's a guy in Germany documenting on YouTube driving his electric semi for fairly long haul trips (up to 900 km per day). His range is typically just under 300 km loaded to about 40 tonnes gvw. Very interesting to watch. Charging infrastructure has a ways to go. But so far he's pretty happy with how it's working out. He says he's not interested in going back to diesel. Even with EU electrical prices he's spending les
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Make that 1.3kwh per km.
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For class 8 trucks if you have the charging infrastructure on place, electric is viable. There's a guy in Germany documenting on YouTube driving his electric semi for fairly long haul trips (up to 900 km per day). His range is typically just under 300 km loaded to about 40 tonnes gvw. Very interesting to watch. Charging infrastructure has a ways to go. But so far he's pretty happy with how it's working out. He says he's not interested in going back to diesel. Even with EU electrical prices he's spending less than on diesel. And he loves how quiet the truck is and that he can maintain speed going up hills and then get the power back regenerating down the hill. Driving through the castle mountain area I think he said he got averaged about 1.3 kw per km. Anyway his channel is called Electric Trucker.
The problem isn’t batteries don’t work, or electric trucks are impossible, it’s basic physics on a high school level. Trucks weigh alot more than cars, they are larger. They simply get worse mileage as a result. Now my f-150 has the tow package, which nearly doubles the gas tank size to 36 gallons for a reason. When towing a 20+ foot long 8’ wide 7’ tall trailer my gas mileage is about halved best case. A regular car maybe has a 12-15 gallon tank, economical cars smaller
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you describe the problems of EV trucks accurately.
The other basic HS physics problem is that continuing to use ICE vehicles is quite literally causing the slow (in human terms) and lightning fast (in earth terms) destruction of the environment.
The inventions to overcome the former probably don't happen before the latter hits and hits hard; especially since a good junk of that hit is already banked and just starting to affect us.
That's where the real problem surfaces. There are going to be some use cases th
Re: The battery tech just isn't there (Score:1)
See...everything has costs.
Burning hydrocarbons drilled from the ground for transportation fuel has costs.
Allowing a certain privileged class of people to determine what use of transportation fuel is "allowed" and what counts as "work" also has costs. Different kinds of costs, to be sure, but costs nevertheless.
Perhaps before we go imposing those latter costs on ourselves, we should ask, how's that going to work out for human prosperity as a whole, rather than the narrow goal of cutting one kind of pollutio
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There are going to be some use cases that can't be done via EVs and we need to tell people that hauling their skidoos around isn't allowed while still allowing work trucks for 'work'.
So you want to ban all towing that is done for recreational purposes. That'll be boats, campers, ATVs, motorcyles, etc al etc. If it's for fun, too damn bad. Do you have any idea how big a chunk of the economy that is? All of the production, maintenance, and operating expenditures, camping/usage fees, tourism, eating out and such. Just directly you are looking at about 2% of GDP and over 4 million employees (3% of all).
Those people, along with everyone who owns a recreational usage item, are going to w
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Those people, along with everyone who owns a recreational usage item, are going to want to hang your authoritarian ass from the nearest light pole.
I was thinking maybe dragging him behind one of those snowmobiles. A two-stroke one, those are still the best.
That's the tough part (Score:1)
None of these sort of places are that remote so over time they'll probably get chargers, but it's a long ways off.
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> But at least right now if you need to tow stuff long distances, which is a very common use case, an electric truck doesn't cut it.
Right, everyone likes to ignore 95% of the driving they do to consider the 5% use case. You could drive an EV most of the time and rent a ICE truck when you need one.
Or.....you could just own what you want to. After all it is your money.
Lets do the Math... Shall we? ;-) (Score:1, Interesting)
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14.7 million Semi trucks registered in California... times the 815lbs of copper for an EV Semi... Equals 11,980,500,000 lbs of copper. (About half of ALL the copper we as humans have managed to mine, SINCE WE STARTED MINING IT commercially, about 125 years ago!) This would toxify approximately 1.2% of the surface of the Earth, to perform that much copper mining. And would bring 100 million pounds of TOXIC heavy metals, to the surface along side it. These are facts. ;-)
That's interesting. Now I'd like to see the math done how much lithium would be needed. And cobalt. And rare earth metals for the motor magnets and such. I've seen some of the numbers and we aren't moving nearly fast enough to expand mining for these minerals. Part of the problem is from states like California that has so many restrictions on mining that they make it impossible to make a profit, if they allow the mining at all. It seems quite contradictory to demand EVs be produced in large numbers bu
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Well that is the *real* issue; We don't allow that type of mining because it *is* environmentally destructive. Importantly it tends to have very local very acute impacts vs the very dilute not localized impact of focil fuels when done right.
If are really going to move off carbon (I think that is unrealistic) then we need to acknowledge that it will be incredibly destructive somewhere. Now that somewhere can potentially be where virtually nobody is - like Greenland - but that only solves the storage proble
Re: Lets do the Math... Shall we? ;-) (Score:1)
You are describing a trade-off between different kinds of non-ideal alternatives.
The thing about a place like the West, which has been wealthy and effectively post-scarcity (by historical standards of anatomically modern humans) is that the idea of there being such a thing as *only* non-ideal alternatives is alien to the psychology of the average decisionmaker. Perhaps there is still the mythical Everyman who understands that pain, suffering, and choices among bad options are a fact of life, but the upper c
The numbers are wrong [Re:Lets do the Math...] (Score:5, Informative)
But the numbers here are wrong. As far as I can tell, Mr. A.C. just made up figures and assumed nobody would check.
14.7 million Semi trucks registered in California...
According to Forbes [forbes.com], "Approximately 1.8 million heavy-duty trucks on California's roads will be affected by the new regulation."
11,980,500,000 lbs of copper [off by an order of magnitude] is about half of ALL the copper we as humans have managed to mine, SINCE WE STARTED MINING IT
According to the USGS [usgs.gov], "roughly 700 million metric tons of copper have been produced around the world". A metric ton is 2205 pounds. So that's 1.5 trillion pounds, not 24 billion pounds.
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This was done intentionally.
Correct. To intentionally mislead people.
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Then they need to start researching more environmentally-friendly ways to mine, maybe using remote controlled machines below the earth starting at 200-300m down under the soil, as to not only make mining safer, but also to find less toxic ways to do it. Without the research, mining will be just as damaging as it's been, and maybe publicly funding research, which pays off with cleaner ways when licensed by a state dirt cheap with requirements to use it when it leaves no byproduct after mining, might be what
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Batteries that use a different chemistry allowing faster charging, longer life, less change of thermal runaway there are several in development that are promising GIY (Google It Yourself)
Better power infrastructure for charging. Renewable are not good enough, Nuclear and hopefully one day Fusion is being worked on
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> 815lbs of copper for an EV Semi
[citation needed]
That's nearly ten times what an EV sedan uses and they do not have that much more horsepower to warrant so much more copper. Show your work.
=Smidge=
Should have done it in stages (Score:3)
They should have focused on the short-haul industry first. Local deliver vehicles and those that travel less than 300mi per day. Even then the baked in increase in food/items will look like another major price hike due to increased shipping/delivery costs. This is especially true for food producers. Their profit margins are pretty slim comparatively. There wont really be any room to absorb expenses. But at least that shit would be limited to just CA. If they are hell bent on paying $20 for a gallon of milk, let them. Fuck those assholes. If they want to burn their cities to the ground, let them. So long as it doesn’t impact the rest of us. I can already see the feedback loop. Higher shipping costs result in higher prices. Higher prices drive demand for higher wages. Higher wages drive higher overhead costs which drive prices up again. Long haul shipping impacts everyone else. Once it crosses state lines, thats when DoT gets involved.
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There should be little need to force short haul, because it makes so much economic sense. Cheaper to operate, less downtime for maintenance, and the up-front additional cost isn't that great or a big issue for businesses investing in vehicles.
For long haul the tech is developing rapidly and already used in Europe and China. It will happen sooner or later, depending on how competitive the US wants to be.
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im curious about the 'cheaper to operate' and if TCO is considered. Hertz just ditched their entire EV fleet of rentals because maintenance was much higher. In the US we have weigh stations where trucks pay fees based on weight because weight impacts road repairs. If you factor in the weight increase will that drive up road repair and in turn shipping costs because higher tarrifs.
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Hertz bought shitty Teslas, and Tesla couldn't supply parts in a reasonable time. Good EVs are much less work than fossil cars due to being simpler. No exhaust, fuel system, variable gearbox, alternator, radiator, spark plugs, cylinders, engine oil etc. Even the brakes get less wear due to regen.
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They should have focused on the short-haul industry first.
Although it's not the way California's regulations require it, many truck manufacturers are starting with short-haul and working their way up to long haul. Many manufacturers are starting with the shortest and lightest applications, school busses. [yale.edu] They are then moving into box trucks, and then tractor-trailer.
When Restrictions Create the Harm. (Score:5, Interesting)
California has no doubt lead the effort to neuter the diesel exhaust pipe for the benefit of all.
That said, any real diesel truck owner will tell you that ever since the modern diesel engine was forced to start breathing through its own asshole (technical description for Exhaust Gas Recirculation), it has killed the traditionally long life of these big engines. Which forces us back through the highly-polluting process of manufacturing engines (and sometimes the rest of the vehicle with it) two to three times more frequently to replace them. Which of course brings us to the don’t-get-me-fuckin’-started topic of pollution caused by our political definition of “recycling”.
Between that and senseless RTO mandates shitting tens of millions of tailpipes back into the atmosphere, I’m not quite sure who’s winning more in the War on Pollution.
Two steps forward, two steps back (Score:2, Informative)
California has no doubt lead the effort to neuter the diesel exhaust pipe for the benefit of all.
I read recently that two of the California 2020 wildfires negated 18 years of climate regulation.
That is to say, two of the 2020 wildfires put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to equal the CO2 savings of 18 years of regulation.
And of course this doesn't count the recent Palisades fire and others around Los Angeles, and the human cost of people losing their homes.
California isn't leading the charge for climate change, they're virtue signaling. There's no principled stance, no bottom-to-top list of actions, no
It's about where that pollution goes (Score:1)
For anything made in America it's pretty trivial to prevent the poison from getting into the air. Costly but trivial. And by costly I mean it's slightly impacts the quarterly results for t
Think globally, act locally (Score:2, Interesting)
They should lead the way and first do something they have 100% control over without Federal waivers.
Going forward they should only buy EV for all government vehicles. Police cars/vans, fire trucks, ambulances, all state owned vehicle staff use, forest service, and whatever boats and planes they have.
Once they've demonstrated how well an all EV fleet works, the rest of the country would naturally just follow.
Re:Think globally, act locally (Score:4, Informative)
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Think of the children ?? (Score:3)
logistics, warehouses, ports. (Score:1)
They obeyed in advance (Score:2)
truckers (Score:2)
Truck companies have better lobbyists than the avg california joe.
Well, at least that's something (Score:1)