LOS ANGELES — California’s prospects for shifting the world to electric trucks just got a lot bleaker under President Donald Trump.
Trump’s cuts to federal funding and attacks on state climate policy that already caused California to withdraw one of its most ambitious pollution rules are raising questions about whether the state can propel its transition forward on its own.
“We just need to think about what the next steps are going to be,” California Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph said last week at a BloombergNEF conference in San Francisco, when asked how the state would move ahead in the absence of its clean truck purchasing mandate.
Trucks are an outsize source of pollution for California and one of the thorniest pieces of the state’s grand experiment to show the world what a net-zero economy looks like. Ten other states follow California’s nation-leading zero-emissions truck sales mandate to phase out about half of diesel truck sales by 2036.
