Don’t outsource trucking decisions to California

From Connecticut Inside Investigator.

There is a bill currently pending in the legislature that would have Connecticut legislators delegate their governing authority to a bureaucracy based in California, called the California Air Resources Board (CARB). HB 5039 would allow Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) to “implement the medium and heavy-duty motor vehicle standards of the state of California, and shall amend such regulations from time to time, in accordance with changes to such standards.” Rather than having the trucking industry – which operates in interstate commerce – follow federal emissions regulations set by US EPA, proponents of this would have truck sales in Connecticut be subject to more stringent emissions standards set by California, which currently include a phased-in electric truck sales mandate. Out-of-state trucks coming to or through Connecticut will not be required to meet this standard.

There are many problems with this, not the least of which is Connecticut permanently ceding its governing authority on this issue to a bureaucracy in a state located thousands of miles away. Connecticut has already done this once before for light-duty vehicle emissions standards, when the legislature passed a law in 2004 to tie ourselves to California. Then in 2020, California announced that they would issue regulations to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars in 2035. Connecticut must do so as well, since our law says Connecticut must do whatever California does on that issue. I suspect that legislators who voted for California car emissions standards in 2004 did not think they would be voting to ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars.

Connecticut should not make the same mistake again. A friend once quipped that “the only thing Connecticut and California have in common is they both begin with C.” Connecticut’s truck fleet is a small fraction of the size of California’s truck fleet, and Connecticut’s annual ozone non-attainment days are a fraction of California’s ozone non-attainment days. California has the two largest ports in the U.S. (which is one of the reasons California is allowed to set their own standards) right next to each other in Los Angeles and Long Beach. Connecticut has minor port activity. The list of non-similarities between the two states are endless, but anyone reading this would get bored of reading such a list.

See the complete article online at Connecticut Inside Investigator.