Diesel-powered vehicles in the cross hairs in California
California’s ban on diesel-powered vehicles weighing over 14,000 pounds and built before 2010 took effect on Jan. 1.
As if we needed another reason not to visit or live in California, we now have one.
California’s Air Resources Board or CARB estimate that the rule will take 200,000 vehicles, including 70,000 big rigs off the road.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles will become the carbon cops.
I’m no lawyer but doesn’t this run afoul of interstate commerce? How can California make vehicle owners from other states comply with this rule?
And what’s scary about this California mandate is that it might be implemented in other states.
It will be interesting to see the impact of this new rule and hopefully other states will wait to implement similar bans until they see how it impacts California.
I predict that what we have seen during the supply chain disruptions across the U.S., will impact Californians in a big way.
The new law not only impacts truck drivers but also puts a heavy burden on farmers and ranchers who use trucks to move goods, many of which are perishable. The electric truck models are two to three times more expensive than diesel vehicles, take four hours to charge and their range is only 100 to 200 miles between charges. And there are a limited number of chargers in California.
According to the California Trucking Association, California would need to install 336 chargers every week until 2035 to be able to meet charging demands for trucks. Chargers are just the beginning of making the new proposal work — an additional 65 megawatts each week need to be supplied by the power grid to support an additional 290,000 electric trucks.
In other news, as I write this Rep. Kevin McCarthy lost in an 13th vote to lead the Republicans in the House.
In my humble opinion, I think that the Republicans should have been talking about this before any votes were cast.
In the words of the captain of the prison where Cool Hand Luke (Paul Newman) was imprisoned “What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate.”
Instead of bringing a messy, embarrassing process to the public, they knew this was going to be a problem and should have taken care of it before any vote was taken.