Nearly 20 state attorneys general are filing a lawsuit against the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over regulations it has attempted to implement demanding that the trucking industry shift towards electric vehicles.
In an op-ed for Fox News, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird (R-Iowa) refers to policies first enacted back in March, in conjunction with an effort by the state of California to ban gas or diesel trucks in favor of electric trucks, ostensibly in the name of reducing so-called “global warming.”
California instituted a ban that requires most commercial vehicles to be electric by the year 2035; this includes 75 percent of buses and larger trucks, 55 percent of delivery vans and smaller trucks, and 40 percent of tractor-trailers and other big rigs. The state plans to completely ban the manufacture and sale of gas- and diesel-powered trucks by 2045.
In response, Biden’s EPA announced that it would grant a waiver for California, allowing it to set its own emission standards separately from the federal standards in place for the rest of the country.
Attorney General Bird notes that, since California represents the fifth-largest economy in the world – and the largest economy of any U.S. state – these rules will have a ripple effect on the trucking industry in neighboring states as well. Other states will be forced to comply with California’s new trucking rules in order to use their vehicles within the state, and thus forces truck manufacturers to comply with the new “green” standards.
As a result, similar truck bans have been enacted in eight other states: Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
“We are pushing back,” Bird says in the op-ed. “The Biden administration’s EPA and California have no right or legal justification to force truckers to follow their radical climate-change policies. That’s why I, along with 18 other state attorneys general, are taking Biden to court.”
Bird says that Biden violated the Constitution by granting California an exemption from federal emissions standards: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that California gets to make the rules for the rest of the country. On the contrary, the Constitution requires equal sovereignty among the states, meaning that one state does not get special treatment to set the standards for everyone else.”
“It’s time to hit the brakes on the California truck ban,” Bird declares. “And our lawsuit will do just that.”