In the effort to continue battling climate change, the White House has mandated new emissions standards for large trucks and buses. Officials say that this will decrease our carbon pollution by 1.1 billion metric tons and decrease our oil consumption by up to 84 billion gallons by 2027.
The news comes via The Detroit News, which writes:
The new rules mandate 25 percent lower carbon emissions and fuel consumption for semitractor-trailer rigs, delivery trucks, school buses and similar vehicles between model years 2021 and 2027. The regulations are intended to build on prior rules that required companies to reduce the pollution by trucks and buses that were made in the model years between 2014 and 2018 by approximately 270 million metric tons.
The White House said the proposal also calls for locking in standards for heavy-duty pickups and vans to become 2.5 percent more efficient annually between model years 2021 and 2027. The rules will be paired with regulations that call for U.S. automakers to achieve a 54.5 miles-per-gallon fleetwide average for cars and other light duty vehicles by 2025, although federal regulators have said that auto companies may miss the goal.
The standards are ambitious, yes, but the feds believe that they are absolutely achievable. Heavy duty vehicles are the second biggest source of CO2 emissions in the U.S.
The trucking industry hopes that the new rules won’t disrupt their businesses.
“While today’s fuel prices are more than 50 percent lower than those we experienced in 2008,” Chris Spear, president of the Arlington, VA-based American Trucking Associations, told The Detroit News, “fuel is still one of the top two operating expenses for most trucking companies.”
However, companies that rely on the trucking industry, like PepsiCo, seem okay with the new regulations. While on the one hand they say that this will spur environmentally minded innovations, it will also help them save money in transportation costs. That will all trickle down and eventually we, the consumers, will be able to save money as well.
How long until they all just go electric and be done with it? Hell, Tesla’s planning on it.