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As the whole damn circus is about to be taken over by a troop of rabid monkeys who insist that what they’re throwing at us is prosperity, we want to remind you to never fall for one of the Mad Chief Macaque’s favorite and stinkiest globs of poo. Like many with an Archie Bunker mentality, Trump loves the old polluting greedhead notion that we have to choose between economic well-being and bringing the climate crisis under control. It’s bullshit, of course, but it’s been perpetuated by the oil-igarchy so long that it seems like common sense.
But as Joe Biden argued even before his first week in office, and reiterated in his farewell speech the other night, “Now we have proven we don’t have to choose between protecting the environment and growing the economy. We’re doing both.” Biden’s climate and jobs legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, is working so well that, as he also pointed out, other nations are looking to it as a model for their own industrial policy programs.
As Yr Wonkette has been saying for some time now (and yeah, we’re totally channeling clean energy journo-nerd David Roberts and many others), we could almost set aside the word “climate” altogether when we argue for transitioning away from a fossil fuel economy. Renewable energy and electrified everything are simply far cheaper and more efficient than the fossil technologies they replace. You don’t have to just take my word for it; that’s the UN talking. (Oh no, we just lost the readers who stumbled in from Gateway Pundit.) For a while now, solar, wind, and storage have been dominating the market for new energy production in the USA. Add to that the enormous savings in health costs resulting from cleaner air, and you have a strong economic case for decarbonizing.
Oh yes, and that transition will have the side benefit of keeping large swaths of the planet habitable for humans and other notable species, many of which are far cuter than us.
Make no mistake: I’m not interested in hopewashing, or what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “bright siding,” a species of gaslighting in which sociopaths paper over problems by insisting everything will be just fine. That’s something I have been accused of when I point out that while Trump will be able to significantly embugger the energy transition, he and his band of vandals won’t be able to snuff it out, just as he couldn’t resurrect the US coal industry, which will definitely die, but not as rapidly as it should.
Yes, there’s no shortage of terrible climate data points! That’s what we get for wasting 40 years before beginning to take real action on climate. Last week, NOAA officially confirmed that, as everyone anticipated, 2024 was the world’s hottest year on record. There’s no need to whistle past the graveyard, because we keep tripping over all these tombstones.
But at the risk of sugarcoating things: The vast majority of climate experts agree that humanity still has plenty of choice over just how terrible we will let things get.
With that in mind, let’s look at a new data point on the climate fight. California state officials have made the decision to give up on proposed regulations that would have ended the sale of new diesel-powered heavy trucks by 2036. The state also dropped its request to the Environmental Protection Agency to approve three other regulations that would have sharply cut use of diesel fuel for railroad locomotives, commercial harbor craft, and those refrigeration units on trucks and rail cars what haul cold stuff.
When I saw the headline about the decision, my first thought was, No! Don’t comply in advance! But the decision was a bit more nuanced: California isn’t simply giving up on emissions reductions because Trump would kill them. Rather, it aims to preserve its option to bring the regulations back in some saner future.
California has authority under the 1973 Clean Air Act to set stricter air quality standards than those set by the federal government. But each new stronger standard requires a waiver from the EPA. Until Donald Trump’s first term, EPA approval was routine, but Trump attempted to rescind California’s special status, a policy reversed by Joe Biden.
In December, Biden’s EPA approved California’s light vehicle standards, which phase out sales of new fossil-fueled cars and light trucks after 2035. But the agency didn’t finish its lengthy review process for the Advanced Clean Fleets rule, proposed in 2022. In addition to ending sales of new diesel trucks by 2036, it mandated existing fleets switch to zero-emissions trucks by 2042.
That would have made a huge difference not only for climate, but also for public health, as CalMatters explains:
Diesel exhaust has been linked to cancer and contains fine particles that can trigger asthma and heart attacks as well as gases that form smog. Low-income, disadvantaged communities of color near ports, freeways and warehouses, especially in the Los Angeles and Long Beach area, have long complained about noxious and dangerous diesel exhaust.
Oh, yes, the trucking industry also sued to stop the measure, claiming that the tech will never work, and also that the rule would destroy California’s economy, as industries have said about every other environmental regulation ever.
Remember how all cars in America became inoperable when leaded gas was banned, and how that destroyed the economy and now we live in caves?
Zero-emissions heavy trucks are already in service, even without regulations mandating them, and the tech will only improve over time. We’ve been meaning to do a piece on that for a while, so watch for that!
Liane Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board, explained in a statement that while the decision to withdraw the waiver applications was prompted by the coming change of administration, it was also a strategic choice with an eye to the future:
“[We] realized that we needed to deploy an offensive strategy to make sure that we maintained control of the waivers, and so we pulled them back,” Randolph said. “The Trump administration has not indicated a lot of support for our clean air and climate strategy, right? So our concern was that if we leave them hanging out there, we don’t know what they’re going to do with them. So we thought it would be better to maintain control.”
Better to hold on to the regulations and hope for a more sane federal government than to risk something worse, although Randolph didn’t say what that might be.
One thing that will definitely be worse is Trump’s renewed vow to eliminate California’s ability to set its own air quality standards. Since California’s special status is written into the Clean Air Act, Trump would need Congress to pass a law to permanently undo it, but he also can use administrative actions to block any new waivers and attempt to reverse those granted already.
Short of regulations, California will now seek voluntary agreements with trucking companies and vehicle manufacturers. Many are already introducing electric or hydrogen fuel cell trucks, because 1) the rest of the industrialized world is electrifying whether we do or not, and US industry wants a piece of the action; and 2) that whole efficiency and cost thing.
There’s also the point made by the auto industry: Capitalism likes predictability, and even if Trump wants to whipsaw energy and environmental policy right back into the smoggy days of the past, companies already preparing for tighter emissions rules a decade down the road are likely to keep planning for that, because shelving new designs is fucking expensive.
The problem with not having regulations, of course, is that companies that aren’t doing such long-term planning are likely to grab market share by selling a lot of polluting trucks that will then stay in service for decades, making the job of decarbonizing even more difficult. That’s your Tragedy of the Commons in action, and it’s a big part of why climate action remains so freaking difficult.
Over the long term, the energy transition will continue, because it’s increasingly better for business. But relying on the market alone won’t get us there quickly enough to avoid catastrophic warming. The challenge now is how much states, civil society, and other countries can move the transition along while the US government spends at least the next four years pretending there’s no problem.
How’s that for starry-eyed optimism?
[Atlantic Council / Wired / Boston College / CalMatters / Volts]
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