Trucker warns Biden admin taking 'extreme' measure to put industry 'out of business'
Biden admin issues emissions rules for semi-tractors, city buses, box and garbage trucks
Biden constantly capitulates to the 'extreme environmentalists': Lewie Pugh
Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association EVP Lewie Pugh reacts to Biden's crackdown on heavy-duty trucks on 'Varney & Co.'
Small business truckers across America are up in arms over the Biden administration’s latest green energy push on their industry.
"This office in the White House is completely not listening to the trucker or the end user or the buyer. They just want to do what the extreme environmentalists want," Lewie Pugh, Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) board member, said on "Varney & Co.," Monday.
"And what it's going to do is put lots and lots of truckers out of business."
Pugh represents 150,000 independent truck drivers who run 225,000 pieces of equipment and feel new emissions rules for heavy-duty vehicles come with more operational challenges than solutions.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced the new regulations on Friday morning. Officials said they represent the strongest-ever greenhouse gas emissions standards of their kind. The rules will kick in beginning in 2026 for model year 2027 vehicles and progressively become more stringent through model year 2032, forcing a larger number of trucks and buses to be zero-emissions in that time frame.
Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association board member Lewie Pugh warned independent drivers will be "out of business" under Biden administration emission rules. (Fox News)
Overall, EPA said the aggressive standards will avoid a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions and provide $13 billion in annualized net societal benefits related to public health, the climate and business savings. The agency claims that the regulations will set the heavy-duty vehicle industry on a "trajectory for sustained growth."
"Where are we going to charge them? That's my first question," Pugh criticized. "There was a company in Joliet, Illinois, that was going to put a terminal in for 30 trucks. The city said, 'you can't do it. You're going to use more electricity than the entire city of Joliet, Illinois.'"
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The new regulations apply to short-haul and long-haul tractor-trailer trucks, in addition to vocational trucks like delivery vehicles, garbage trucks, school and public transit buses, concrete trucks and fire trucks. EPA previously projected that the standards could lead to 50% of vocational trucks, 35% of short-haul tractor-trailers and 25% of long-haul tractor-trailers produced in 2032 being electric.
"Our highway trust fund that would pay for stuff like this is already on the brink of going bankrupt. Where is the money going to come from?" Pugh posited. "We can't take care of our infrastructure that we have now, and we're going to put all this stuff in and then hope it works?"
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"[We’re] all saying, there's no way this is going to work. We can't do it. They're concerned about their lives and their livelihood," he continued. "What happens in the wintertime? You get stuck in a snow blizzard along the highway for two or three days and your battery goes, these people could freeze to death and die."
The final standards are somewhat less stringent than the first proposed standards in April 2023. They come one week after the EPA finalized its multi-pollutant emission standards for light-and medium-duty vehicles, the strongest of their kind to date.
Fox News’ Thomas Catenacci contributed to this report.