In another step in efforts to slash United States oil consumption and carbon emissions President Barack Obama has directed federal agencies to develop higher fuel standards for medium and heavy trucks.
President Obama made the announcement in Maryland, about 30 kilometres from Washington, at a distribution centre for Safeway grocery stores, next to a trucking rig that had been redesigned to increase fuel economy.
“Everybody who says you can’t grow the economy while bringing down pollution, it’s turned out they’ve been wrong,” President Obama said.
Reuters Newsagency reports carmakers are already working to nearly double the average fuel economy of new US cars and light trucks to 4.3 litres per 100km by 2025, under rules that took effect in 2012.
The administration will now direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Transportation to develop new rules for medium- and heavy-duty vehicle fuel efficiency by March 2016, with a draft due a year before that.
EPA chief Gina McCarthy and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx were on hand for President Obama’s announcement.
The new rules will build on standards already in place for model years 2014-18 for those larger vehicles, including semi-trailers.
The rules also affect so-called vocational vehicles, which include delivery trucks, buses and garbage trucks, and heavy-duty utilities and vans.
The White House estimates that the first phase of fuel efficiency standards for trucks will save a projected 530 million barrels of oil.
The second phase “will take us well into the next decade,” President Obama said.
“The goal we’re setting is ambitious, but these are areas where ambition has worked out really well for us so far. Don’t make small plans, make big plans.”
Reuters reports in 2010, heavy-duty vehicles represented just four per cent of registered vehicles on the road in the United States, but they accounted for approximately 25 per cent of on-road fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector.
News of the new fuel standards was welcomed by some of the biggest operators of truck fleets in the United States, who have formed an informal alliance, the Heavy Duty Fuel Efficiency Leadership Group.
The new standards “will be an important milestone that should result in significant benefits to our economy, the trucking industry and the environment,” said Douglas Stotlar, president and chief executive officer of Con-way, the nation’s third-largest freight company.
Navistar International, a maker of commercial trucks, praised the administration’s decision to consult industry at the outset of the rule-making process and said the push for increased economy was one that truck buyers and operators supported.
According to White House estimates the large combination trucks commonly known as 18-wheelers haul about 70 per cent of all freight tonnage in the United States.
Reuters reports development of new truck fuel standards is another sign of the administration’s efforts to address climate change and convince Americans of the urgent need to take action.
By ordering federal agencies to develop new standards, President Obama is able to act on his own and sidestep Congress, which remains divided on climate policy.
While in California, touring part of that state’s severe drought zone, President Obama warned that a warming planet was intensifying the severity of droughts and other extreme weather events.
“Unless and until we do more to combat carbon pollution that causes climate change, this trend is going to get worse,” he said.
President Obama also renewed his appeal for Congress to end US$4 billion a year in subsidies to the oil and gas industry.
He also urged politicians to establish a $2 billion “energy security trust” to support development of advanced vehicles that run on electricity, home-grown bio-fuels, hydrogen, and domestically produced natural ga
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