Cheaper Groceries, Dirtier Air. Which One Reaches You First?
Every gallon of milk, every couch, every bag of dog food in our homes got there on the back of a heavy duty truck. We rarely think about the exhaust those trucks leave behind, mostly because we cannot see it. Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants us to breathe a little more of it.
On Thursday the Trump EPA proposed loosening a Biden-era rule that forced truck engines to pollute less, and to keep polluting less for longer, according to The Hill. The pitch is all about savings. The agency says the changes would cut industry costs by about $12 billion, or roughly $6,000 per new truck, according to The Hill. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin argued those savings would reach us at checkout, telling an audience that when it costs less to move goods, it costs less to buy them.
That sounds good until you read the fine print.
The heart of the change is a warranty. Under the Biden rule, engine makers had to guarantee their pollution controls would keep working for 450,000 miles, up from 100,000 miles, according to The Hill. The Trump EPA wants to roll that guarantee back down to 100,000 miles. It also wants to delay, and possibly scrap entirely, a requirement that engines keep meeting emissions standards for their first 650,000 miles on the road, according to The Hill. And it would end a rule that automatically slows a truck when its pollution controls fail, swapping the forced slowdown for a warning light or a beep, according to NPR.
According to the EPA’s own analysis reported by NPR, the plan would increase ozone forming nitrogen oxide pollution from heavy trucks by 4.2 percent in 2030 and by 11.6 percent by 2055. The agency admitted it did not even model what that means for our air quality or our health, according to NPR.
We do not have to guess. Nitrogen oxides feed the smog over our cities and the acid rain that eats at our lakes and forests. Long term exposure to nitrogen dioxide can help trigger asthma and leave us more open to respiratory infections. The Environmental Defense Fund notes that heavy trucks are only about 5 percent of the vehicles on our roads yet rank among the largest sources of the pollutants that cause asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart attacks, strokes and preventable deaths, according to NPR.
So the real trade is this. We might save a few dollars at the store, someday, maybe. In exchange, kids near highways and freight yards breathe dirtier air for decades. Those neighborhoods are rarely the wealthy ones.
The trucking industry says it can already meet the tougher standards, and that it has cut heavy duty emissions by 99 percent since 1970, according to Commercial Carrier Journal. That is a real success story. It is also a strange argument for backing off now, right as the finish line comes into view.
None of this is final. The proposal is open for public comment, according to NPR, which means the decision is not Zeldin’s alone. It is ours to weigh in on too.
We should ask one plain question before this becomes law. When an agency named for protecting the environment proposes more pollution and cannot tell us what it will do to our lungs, who exactly is it protecting? If the answer is not us, we have every right to say so, loudly, while the comment window is still open. Go beyond the headlines…
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