The day after: Speculation abounds on California trucking regulation with no ACF

California’s trucking industry spent Wednesday speculating about the future of its vehicle mix now that there will be no state mandate to buy zero-emission vehicles following the effective death of the Advanced Clean Fleets rule.

The ACF was killed for all intents and purposes by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) when it withdrew its waiver request under the Clean Air Act to the Environmental Protection Agency. If granted, the waiver would have allowed the regulation to move forward. However, the Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule remains on the books and has an EPA waiver. 

The end result: a lot of uncertainty on everything except the fact that there will be no ACF anytime in the near future.

“The bottom line here is that the ACF, and really, California’s move to electrify its trucks, is pretty much dead for now,” Glen Kedzie, a principal with E&E Strategies and a longtime specialist in environmental regulations impacting trucking, told FreightWaves in an interview.

Not all because of a new administration

The conventional wisdom is that CARB’s decision to withdraw its waiver request was driven by the reality that a Trump administration was not likely to grant the waiver, but several observers close to the process disputed that as overly simplistic.

As Matt Schrap, the CEO of the drayage-focused Harbor Trucking Association noted, a process that was assumed at the start was likely to end with a waiver granted had not, just days before the end of an administration that has leaned heavily into alternative transportation fuels,  actually yielded one. “They could have, but they didn’t,” Schrap said.

That is likely to have led to some soul-searching at CARB, Kedzie said.

“There was plenty of justification to do what ended up happening at the end,” Kedzie said in an interview with FreightWaves. “If EPA had denied the waiver, then CARB would have been in a place where it is kind of like a black eye.”

The history of waiver requests from California to the EPA under the Clean Air Act is one of the state’s getting almost everything it had sought. A rejection of the ACF waiver would have been a notable change.

“I’m sure there were a lot of discussions between the legal beagles at CARB and the legal beagles at EPA,” Kedzie said. And those discussions, he said, may have involved an ultimatum from EPA: “You can withdraw it,…

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