President Obama has delivered more details on the higher fuel economy standards his administration is working on for big trucks. The proposed plan, which Obama called “ambitious” in his speech today, will be applied to medium and heavy-duty vehicles and comes with three main parts:
- The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation (DOT) will need to “develop and issue the next phase of medium- and heavy-duty vehicle fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards by March 2016.” That means that the historic big rig standards proposed in 2011 (for model year 2014 through 2018 vehicles) will get updated and raised. This is key, the White House says, since heavy-duty vehicles “accounted for approximately 25 percent of on-road fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector” in 2010. For the record, 10.7 miles per gallon represents a highly efficient semi truck.
- The government wants the private sector to offer even more efficient trucks, adding things like hybrid powertrains and more aerodynamic designs to the expressway trucks. In 2010, the Obama Administration started the SuperTruck program that is trying to show how a Class 8 truck can improve its “freight hauling efficiency” by 50 percent by 2015.
- End the $4 billion in subsidies for oil and gas companies and put the money saved into an Energy Security Trust Fund and use it for things like tax credits for cellulosic biofuels.
The president made the announcement at a Safeway distribution center in Upper Marlboro, MD. Being ambitious is important, the President said, because “these are areas where ambition has worked out really well for us so far. … Every time someone says you can’t grow the economy, while bringing down pollution, it turns out they’ve been wrong. Anybody who says we can’t compete when it comes to clean energy technologies – like solar and wind – they’ve had to eat those words.”
The trucking industry, represented by the Heavy Duty Fuel Efficiency Leadership Group, as well as outside groups like ACEEE and the Union of Concerned Scientists, were all receptive to the proposal.
