UPPER MARLBORO, Ma. - President Barack Obama on Tuesday directed federal agencies to develop higher fuel standards for medium-sized and heavy trucks, another step in his efforts to slash oil consumption and carbon emissions blamed for global warming.
Obama made the announcement about 20 miles from Washington, D.C., at a distribution center 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,” Obama said.
Automakers are already working to nearly double the average fuel economy of new U.S. cars and light trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, under rules that took effect in 2012.
The administration will now direct the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop new rules for medium- and heavy-duty vehicle fuel efficiency by March 2016.
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EPA chief Gina McCarthy and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx were on hand for 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 and “big rigs” as well as so-called vocational vehicles, which include delivery trucks, buses and garbage trucks, and heavy-duty pickup trucks and vans.
The new fuel economy standards “will take us well into the next decade,” 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.”
In 2010, heavy-duty vehicles represented just 4 percent of registered vehicles on the road in the United States, but they accounted for approximately 25 percent 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 U.S., 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 Inc., the nation’s third-largest freight company.
The large combination trucks commonly known as 18-wheelers haul about 70 percent of all freight tonnage in the United States, according to White House estimates.
“The fuel costs associated with shipping goods cross-country heavily impact the price of everything from a carton of milk to a pair of shoes,” said Mark Cooper, director of research with the Consumer Federation of America.
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Flurry of climate announcements
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, Obama is able to act on his own and sidestep Congress, which remains divided on climate policy.
While in California on Friday, touring part of that state’s severe drought zone, Obama warned that a warming planet is 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.
The trucking announcement also followed a climate-focused speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Jakarta on Sunday. On Wednesday, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is scheduled to make what has been termed a “major announcement” on the administration’s energy strategy.
Obama also renewed his appeal for Congress to end $4 billion a year in subsidies to the oil and gas industry and urge lawmakers to establish a $2 billion “energy security trust” to support development of advanced vehicles that run on electricity, homegrown biofuels, hydrogen, and domestically produced natural gas.
The $2 billion in spending would be drawn from revenues generated by federal oil and gas development.
