The campaign by California to force trucking companies to adopt electric trucks will soon crash.
Mike Hilgers, Nebraska’s attorney general, says Nebraska Will Fight the Radical Campaign for Electric Trucks
Heavy-duty trucks form the backbone of the U.S. logistics industry. They are essential to the movement and affordability of goods. Shipping costs account for a significant part of the price of everything sold in America. Now an unelected group of powerful actors has opened a three-front effort to transform the nation’s logistics fleet from diesel-powered to electric-powered at a breakneck pace. This terrible policy is being crafted almost entirely out of public view. Nebraska is fighting back.
More than 70% of the nation’s freight is moved by truck, and 80% of U.S. communities rely exclusively on trucking to receive goods. The infrastructure for a diesel-powered logistics industry is robust and predictable—millions of such trucks are already in service, fuel stations are plentiful, and the roads are designed to meet the payload capacity and vehicle weight of trucks powered by an internal-combustion engine.
Charging stations for heavy-duty trucks, which draw significant amounts of power, hardly exist anywhere in the country. Nebraska, with the country’s longest stretch of Interstate 80, doesn’t have a single charging station that could charge an electric semi truck. Even if that infrastructure magically appeared, charging a semi is a slow process that wastes precious time. A full charge will take an electric truck only about one-fourth as far as a full tank will take a diesel one, and cold weather makes the electric truck’s range even shorter. Good luck moving freight long distances in severe Midwestern winter.
Electric semis are also heavier than their internal-combustion counterparts, meaning they have less carrying capacity and will cause more damage to roads. And it’s unclear that the country’s stressed electric grid can handle an electric trucking fleet. It’s also an open question whether or not the battery components could be sourced at scale to make an electric shipping fleet. Even if that proves possible, it would make the U.S. more dependent on hostile foreign powers, which control the vast majority of the needed minerals.
It is highly improbable that politically accountable policymakers or a free market would drive this radical transformation. It is happening anyway, led by three sets of unelected actors.
First, state regulators, such as the California Air Resources Board, have issued regulations that force trucking companies to add electric trucks to their fleets if they make even a single trip to California. Sacramento is effectively attempting to force electric-truck mandates on the rest of the country. Several other states have adopted California’s standards or announced their intent do to so.
Second, the regulators in the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency have used statutes that Congress passed well before electric vehicles were commercially viable to impose nationwide mandates. Today, less than 0.001% of all heavy-duty vehicles are battery powered. The Biden administration projects that its EV rule would require 45% of all heavy-duty vehicles sold nationwide to be electric in seven years.
Third, the private companies that make semi trucks are using their market power to force this change. The country’s largest truck manufacturers agreed not to push back against California’s electric-truck mandates and to abide by them even if they are struck down in court. This effectively operates as a restriction on output, a classic antitrust concern, which will increase prices for consumers of internal-combustion engine vehicles.
Each of these three efforts to eradicate the internal-combustion engine is illegal, and Nebraska has spearheaded a three-pronged counteroffensive against them. We are leading a 24-state coalition in a lawsuit against the EPA, a 17-state coalition in a lawsuit against California regulators, and a Nebraska-specific antitrust lawsuit against four of the largest truck manufacturers and their trade association.
The separation of powers and the rule of law matter. Unelected bureaucrats at the EPA, unelected bureaucrats in California, and the unelected oligopolists that make semi trucks can’t unilaterally enact a sweeping electric-truck mandate that Congress never authorized and that would never take place in a free market.
This issue will be mostly settled next week, perhaps even Monday, the day Trump takes office.
I say “mostly settled” because there will be ridiculous lawsuits all of which will soon be flushed down the toilet where they belong.
We should all look forward to sensible energy policies, not nonsense dictated by California.