California Should Leave Its Truckers Alone

National Review Online

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

 

In one of the battles of the progressives’ war on things that work, California is making life harder for truck drivers and everyone who depends on them.

 

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) was created in 1967 under Governor Ronald Reagan, and it was one of Reagan’s greatest mistakes. The CARB is an independent agency of the California state government. The federal Clean Air Act governs emissions standards nationally, or at least it’s supposed to, but the EPA waives the Clean Air Act for California to set stricter standards. Over time, a coalition of 14 other states and the District of Columbia have glommed onto California’s rules. Since California plus that coalition make up a large portion of the total U.S. vehicle market, the CARB has de facto power to set national emissions standards for the country.

 

It’s not only for that reason that California’s trucking regulations affect everyone. More U.S. imports come through California than through any other single state. Imports sometimes get caricatured as “cheap stuff from China,” but about half of U.S. imports are inputs for domestic production, which is spread across the other 47 contiguous states. And the effects on consumer prices are nothing to shrug off either, especially with higher-than-normal inflation.

 

The CARB’s Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule requires truck manufacturers to sell only zero-emissions drayage trucks in California by 2035. Drayage trucks operate within ports or drive between ports and nearby rail yards and warehouses. The rule will start being phased in next year. On top of that, the CARB’s Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule requires trucking companies to purchase only zero-emissions trucks by 2035, again to be phased in starting next year.

 

Right now, “zero-emissions” mostly means “electric,” and electric trucks are, by almost any definition, worse than diesel trucks. They’re far more expensive. They take hours to recharge, rather than 15 minutes at a fuel pump. They’re heavier, so they can’t carry as much freight. And all the extra costs will be passed down the supply chain, with at least some of them falling on the end consumer.

 

California also doesn’t yet have the charging infrastructure to power all the new trucks it is requiring. And even if it did, the state’s electric grid faces reliability concerns with current levels of power usage, let alone the extra usage required for thousands of heavy-duty trucks.

 

If you know something valuable will be harder to buy starting next year, you’ll buy more of it now. Matt Schrap, the CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association, a trade group for California drayage truckers, said that trucking companies are buying more diesel trucks while they still can, before the new regulations start to kick in next January. He also said that in 2025, trucking companies will have to report engine mileage for all their trucks, because the rule also requires that engines with over 800,000 miles be removed. He said 2,000 trucks will become illegal overnight when the new rules take effect.

 

Schrap also pointed out that the CARB doesn’t understand how the drayage industry works. First, its models assume companies will replace diesel trucks with electric trucks one-to-one. They won’t, because electric trucks’ lower capacity means more are needed to haul the same amount of freight, and because the increased number of diesel trucks now will stay in fleets for a longer period of time than the CARB had expected. Second, some drayage operators drive to warehouses in California’s Central Valley, and it’s not possible for electric trucks to make it there and back on one charge, Schrap said.

 

Maybe shippers would look to rail as an alternative, but California’s environmental regulations are in the way there as well. The CARB has set emissions regulations for railroads that essentially require them to adopt technology that doesn’t exist yet by 2030. And the state’s other environmental regulations have prevented the construction of new rail infrastructure projects that would increase capacity and make the network more efficient, which would likely have the happy effect of reducing emissions, if they were permitted to be built.

 

And then there are the labor problems. California’s A.B. 5, and litigation surrounding it, has kept trucking companies in limbo for years as they assess whether their business models meet the state’s standards. A.B. 5 set stricter rules for independent contractors, which is how many truck drivers are classified. Now that the law has been in effect for about a year, California is arguing in court that it has made little difference in the trucking sector — which raises the question of why it was necessary in the first place, and why the new compliance efforts by trucking companies were worthwhile. And it has made some difference: for the Teamsters, who have benefited from it, and for some truck drivers, who have lost contracts.

 

California’s logistics industry is one of the state’s top economic assets, and its functioning is important to the rest of the country. Progressives see it as a target for environmental and labor regulations, with questionable environmental benefits and poorly planned implementation, that will make goods more expensive for all Americans. Leave the truckers alone.