In a podcast discussion with Motor Transport Association of Connecticut President Joe Sculley on Friday, Volvo Group North America spokesperson Dawn Fenton objected to the Constitution State following California’s carbon-emission regulations for trucks.
California is the only state possessing a waiver allowing it to establish its own emission controls, which are stronger than those required by the federal Clean Air Act. Environmental progressives have backed the waiver, which former President Donald Trump rescinded and which President Joe Biden reactivated last month.
Under regulations set forth by California’s Clean Air Resources Board (CARB), the use of many trucks with diesel engines built during or before 2006 would need to cease because those machines don’t contain updated technology that reduces carbon-dioxide discharge associated with global warming. In the Golden State, an estimated 76,000 trucks would no longer be eligible for use. Connecticut is among 16 states—mostly in the northeast, mid-Atlantic and Pacific northwest—that have officially endorsed CARB standards.
Fenton said Connecticut’s alignment of its truck-emissions policy with California’s hasn’t troubled truck manufacturers in the past because California’s standards and federal standards have long coincided. But the West Coast state has recently ramped up its fuel-emissions controls, causing concern among truckers and vehicle manufacturers that their expenses will rise significantly.
Connecticut has not yet put California’s truck-emissions rules into effect, though Democrats in the General Assembly have passed legislation to do so in the Environment Committee. Republican legislators have opposed plans to implement the CARB standards.
“This does really pose problems for the industry, because, as you and your listeners know very well, this industry, by definition, is a national industry,” Fenton told Sculley on the Nutmeg State Transportation Report, which the latter hosts. “And we need regulations to be national in scope. We have trucks that are crossing state lines all the time and if we have different regulations from state to state, it only further invites ways of getting around the system – people buying trucks in different states, the fact that you have trucks from certain states that are going to cross state lines anyway, and so it’s complicated.”
The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed new rules that the agency says will reduce carbon emissions from trucks by 90 percent per truck, something to which neither Fenton nor Sculley said they objected.
“I feel that trucking has made incredible environmental progress over the last 30-plus years and that should be recognized,” he said. “However, there is always room for more improvement and that’s why we have new regulations being proposed right now.”
Sculley said it would take 60 contemporarily built trucks to emit the amount of carbon dioxide that would have come out of truck manufactured three decades ago.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Connecticut Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Volvo Office” by Raysonho.
