Why are truck companies holding back clean trucks? Let’s hold them accountable

Outside my window, traffic on Interstate 278 (known here as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, or BQE) hums and occasionally honks along twenty-four hours a day, every day. About 17,000 trucks use the BQE daily to bring goods across the New York City region. That’s a lot of belching tailpipes.

But there is change on the smoggy horizon. In the coming days, the EPA is expected to finalize new standards to reduce the legal threshold permitted for greenhouse gas emissions in trucks manufactured and sold starting in model year 2027.

Despite the universal good a standard to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from trucks and buses would deliver, truck manufacturers and the oil industry have been advocating to weaken the proposed standards despite making it seem publicly like they support them. In comments to the EPA, the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association said that without substantial revision, including slower timelines, the standards would be "arbitrary, capricious and wholly unreasonable." Similarly, Daimler Truck and Volvo Group pushed to delay the standards and, together with their friends at the American Petroleum Institute, to reduce their stringency.

But why? The fact is that they will save money over the ownership of any more fuel efficient heavy-duty truck, including an electric one. Electric trucks have lower fueling and operating costs and fewer maintenance requirements and are not subject to fluctuating fuel prices. A new electric delivery truck can cost 34 percent less than a diesel truck over the life of the vehicle. There are already over 200 existing medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission truck models commercially available in the U.S. today, and upfront costs for EV trucks are expected to drop up to 44% by 2027.

Not surprisingly, the industry comments don’t mention the substantial potential health benefits for our most vulnerable communities. Maybe because of where I live, I was not surprised when I learned that almost 60% of NOx and PM (particulate matter) exhaust emissions from trucks and buses happen in urban areas.

What shocked me were the dire statistics about disparities in pollution exposure, burden, and its consequences. Black and brown and low-income communities are more likely to live in ‘diesel death zones’ where truck pollution creates greater risk of birth defects, lung disease, asthma, and cancer. To take one gut-wrenching statistic of many: Latino/e children visit the ER due to asthma at twice the rate of non-Hispanic white children and are 40% more likely to die from asthma.

More than 45 million people in the United States live within 300 feet of a major transportation facility or roadway that exposes them to potentially hazardous levels of pollution.  While trucks and buses account for only 4 percent of vehicles on the road, they are responsible for roughly 25 percent of total transportation sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Truck emissions are the fastest-growing source of climate harming emissions, and the number of truck miles traveled is forecast to continue to grow significantly in the coming decades. In 2020, trucks nationwide consumed 55.3 billion gallons of fuel and emitted 561 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses, 1.5 million metric tons of smog forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) and 38,000 metric tons of particulate matter (PM).

As we’ve seen, truck companies won’t take nearly enough independent, proactive action to reduce the harms their vehicles cause us. EPA has a responsibility to require that trucks and buses are safe for the climate and our health.   

Beyond what we see from EPA in the coming days at the federal level, there are additional policy opportunities to clean up truck pollution at the state level. The Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) standard – now adopted by 11 states and counting – helps the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sector transition to zero-emissions, clean up our air, and drive economic growth. These standards require manufacturers to sell an increasing percentage of ZEVs over time.

The more states that join the program, the cleaner our air, the safer our planet, and the faster we reach economies of scale for clean trucks; a crucially important win-win-win. But we need also to watch out for industry meddling and misinformation at the state level. Fighting for the public interest is an ongoing and multi-front endeavor. We are determined to get a knockout victory in this fight.