LOS ANGELES — As the new Trump administration and blue states spar over the future of clean energy, a critical battle will determine the future of Southern California’s smog.
Los Angeles’ biggest clean-air initiative — an effort to convert over a thousand heavy-duty vehicles from diesel to batteries or hydrogen — has had a turbulent couple of months because of Trump’s regulatory rollback and funding freeze.
The controversy centers on Los Angeles’ sprawling port and the thousands of ships, cranes, trucks and trains that serve it. Biden’s EPA gave the region three enormous grants, totaling more than $1.1 billion, to kick-start a migration to big vehicles without tailpipes. Nationwide, dozens of ports are experiencing the same uncertainty with their own grant money.
Most experts interviewed for this story believe losing EPA’s funding would set back Los Angeles’ and California’s move to EV trucks by five years — an interval in which more Angelenos will get cancer and asthma, and in which China’s lead in the industry will grow.
“People have projects and jobs counting on these funds, and they don’t know what they should be doing right now,” said Jason Mathers, who heads zero-emission truck program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s massively disruptive and it’s confusing.”
But the beleaguered LA Basin faces a president who is twice skeptical.
First, the projects are among the many clean-energy programs from which the administration is withholding money as it searches for waste and fraud. Second, the funds will in part go to buy more than 800 electric heavy-duty trucks, a vehicle that Trump targeted on the campaign trail as a misguided California creation.
“Fifty years ago, a truck was better than the best electric truck today,” Trump said at a New Mexico rally in October.
The stakes also are high for Los Angeles, where leaders tangled with Trump over who was to blame for this year’s disastrous wildfires.
Diesel vehicles that move goods produce 80 percent of the region’s nitrogen oxide pollution and 30 percent of particulate matter — both major contributors to smog, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), the regional air regulator that received a $500 million EPA grant, most of it designed to stamp out diesel pollution. Those same vehicles are leading causes of asthma and cancer in the region of 18 million people.
These cargo movers are “the biggest source of air pollution in the LA Basin, which is the smoggiest region in the entire country,” said Bill Magavern, a veteran of the California air wars and policy director for the nonprofit Coalition for Clean Air.
The initiative is also a top priority for California, which sees retiring diesel engines as a triple win. Running big vehicles on hydrogen or batteries could reduce the state’s climate emissions, clear the perpetually dirty air of the Southland, and improve health among the disadvantaged, black and brown communities who live on freight routes.
The Biden administration agreed — and sent money accordingly. It sent the LA port and the local air regulator the largest federal grants they have ever received. In each of three EPA funding programs, Los Angeles won a bigger slice of funds than any other city or region.
But with Trump in office, this tide of support has become confused by delays and mixed signals.
For its part, EPA said in a statement to E&E News on Feb. 18 that it “worked expeditiously to enable payment accounts for … grant recipients, so funding is now accessible to all recipients.”
The recipients say they are having different experiences.
One, the LA Port, says that its communications with EPA were sporadic until Feb. 24, when EPA said its funding freeze was lifted. This week, the port received its first allocation of funding, and had a virtual meeting with EPA officials. Another, AQMD, says it has communicated with EPA and that its access goes online and offline without notice. Still another, Climate United, says its funds are frozen in a standoff with EPA.
Meanwhile, California isn’t the only beneficiary waiting on Trump.
Dozens of ports around the country are counting on a $3 billion EPA program to buy electric versions of diesel cargo-moving equipment. If the funds don’t arrive, America could fall further behind in race to build these next-generation vehicles to China.
Last year, China added 82,277 heavy-duty electric trucks to its roads, according to data compiled by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit research group. The U.S. added 1,476.
“It’s a big interest of ports, large and small, in states red and blue,” said Ian Gansler, the director of government relations at the American Association of Port Authorities, a trade group for Western Hemisphere ports, most of them in the United States.
A port and its petroleum
The diesel engine and the nation’s commerce are inextricably intertwined on Los Angeles’ waterfront.
Every day, enormous container ships steam into San Pedro Bay and stop alongside docks at the city-owned ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Freighted mostly with imports from Asia, they are stacked stories tall with steel containers, painted blue, green and pink like a kid’s toy blocks.
Last year, the two together moved almost 20 million container units of cargo, shattering traffic records. They are by far the nation’s busiest port complex.
It’s significant what the ships do when they dock: They turn off their engines. Instead of idling, which would send their emissions into Los Angeles, they run shore operations on the local power grid, using an electrical plug almost the size of a dinner plate. The LA Port was the first in the world to electrify a container ship in 2004, and now this “cold ironing” process is becoming the global standard.
“It’s fair to say the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have been leaders in electrification, not just in the country, but in the world,” said Gansler.
But while the City of Angels has a high profile as an electrification capital, from these huge ships to the Rivians that zip around Hollywood, its port remains a petroleum superhub.
Under the port area is the Wilmington oil field, one of the nation’s largest. Along the waterfront are oil refineries, which convert raw crude into petroleum products to sell. Four of Southern California’s seven refineries are gathered here, processing more than a third of the state’s crude-oil capacity.
One of the most common products is diesel.
Some gets siphoned right back into the bellies of the ships. Smaller allotments go to vehicles behind the port gates that Angelenos rarely see, like forklifts, tractors and mobile cranes. They clank, beep and whir as they shuttle containers around the grounds, spewing diesel exhaust that Angelenos later breathe.
Then it’s the trucks’ turn. With their diesel engines rumbling, they line up at the gates and get assigned to lanes between container stacks. Longshoremen lower the cargo onto their chassis.
Altogether, this continuum — of oil being pumped from the ground, refined into gasoline and diesel, and then fed to vehicles — accounts for more than half of the LA region’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to AQMD. Cargo hauling made up 38 percent of the state’s carbon emissions in 2021, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Those emissions, in turn, feed the rising temperatures that contribute to the Southland’s drought and wildfires.
The trucks issue from the port onto parallel freeways: State Route 110, called the Harbor Freeway, and 710, the Long Beach Freeway, lumbering in the slow lanes. They head to the train yards, where containers are loaded onto diesel-powered locomotives. Or they head to warehouses, either local or far inland, bringing diesel-laden smog with them. From there, the goods are reshuffled into other containers. And the stuff of American life heads to its destinations on the backs of more diesel-powered trucks.
Ground zero
Next to this nonstop commotion is the portside community of Wilmington.
Armchairs and tuna fish and blue jeans and circuit boards pass anonymously through here, stashed in steel boxes. The fuel is pumped and cracked here. The trucks roar; the refinery towers hiss; the train horns sound; container shuttlers beep when they back up. The tall ship-to-shore cranes and the refinery towers define the skyline.
“Apart from the noise, the traffic, is the dust,” said Nancy Gonzalez, describing in Spanish the effects of living near a truck route in the little pink stucco house she occupies on Drumm Avenue.
She smears a finger on her white wrought-iron fence and holds up a black fingertip. “It’s like a satin dust. It’s everywhere,” she said. Drumm is the busiest residential street in Wilmington, where trucks wheeze by at all hours, at one point registering 17,000 trips in one week. Even on hot days she keeps the windows closed, even though she doesn’t have air conditioning. If she doesn’t, she said, the dust gets on the plates, the spoons, the sheets.
Wilmington is a working-class community that is three quarters Latino, with Spanish common on the streets. It is flanked by wealthier communities with better air. Just one coastal ridge away, golfers ride their carts at Trump’s Los Angeles golf course.
The dust produced by diesel engines is dangerous to the millions of people who live near the Southland’s port freight routes.
CARB estimates that 70 percent of the state’s airborne cancer risk comes from diesel exhaust. It causes 1,400 premature cardiovascular deaths a year, along with being a leading cause of asthma and creation and inflaming allergies.
However, California’s diesel pollution has declined steeply as the state required cleaner fuel and engines. Over a quarter-century, the state’s diesel particulate matter declined by 68 percent, according to a 2015 study.
Along with that has come an improvement in smog. Los Angeles, ringed by tall mountains, is a stagnant trough for air pollutants, and regulators have battled them for decades. Breathing the air is healthier than it used to be, said Ed Avol, a retired University of Southern California professor who studied the chemistry and physics of air pollutants. When he came here as a young man in the 1960s, it was “a few months before I even realized there were mountains in Los Angeles.”
In recent years, CARB and AQMD, have focusing more on eliminating the tailpipe emissions altogether. That means hydrogen fuel cell or battery-electric vehicles.
By electrifying these diesel engines, “We could finally see actual clean air in Los Angeles that’s healthy for people to breathe since before the birth of the Clean Air Act” in 1970, Magavern said.
California’s rule goes down
Trump last year turned California’s electric trucks into a topic of national conversation — and dealt them a heavy blow before he even took office.
He began in the fall by seizing on the state’s attempt to require businesses to buy them. He said he’d heard from truck-fleet operators facing unnamed regulators who “burst into your office to demand that you go all electric.” He told the New Mexico rally it was “Like Gestapo stuff.”
Trump seemed to be referring to a California air regulation called the Advanced Clean Fleets rule. Approved by CARB two years ago, it required truck fleets to buy only zero-emissions trucks.
The rule called out drayage trucks, which carry cargo from port to warehouse. Drayage trucks are California regulators’ top targets for electrification because they are generally older and more polluting than other big trucks. They also travel relatively short distances, which makes them a better fit with batteries and their shorter range.
While California’s market for electric passenger cars is starting to boom — with 1.7 million sold last year, a quarter of all new car sales — the same can’t be said for trucks without tailpipes. Only 853 were on to the road in 2023, the latest year of data available.
The clean-fleets proviso was already on the ropes before Trump criticized it. The e-purchases were supposed to start in 2024, but CARB delayed in the face of opposition from the trucking industry.
“We did not think it was going to be realistic on the time scale that was proposed,” said Chris Shimoda, who leads government affairs at the California Trucking Association, which sued CARB to prevent the rule from going into effect.
Truckers argued that CARB had sought but not yet obtained a waiver from EPA to implement the rule. Under federal law, California can make tougher vehicle emissions rules than the feds do, but only with the waiver.
The waiver never came. EPA granted waivers to other types of vehicles before Biden’s term — ones that Trump is now challenging — but never rendered a decision on the electric-fleet rule.
A week after Trump’s election victory, CARB withdrew its waiver request. That essentially shut down the program, leaving no limits on what vehicles drayage truckers can buy. In December, only three percent of truck trips at the Port of LA were made by zero-emissions trucks.
Now CARB “is assessing its options,” according to a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News by CARB chair Liane Randolph.
Funds freeze
The stick that Los Angeles meant to use — a requirement for fleets to buy electric trucks — died before Trump took office. Now that he is president, California’s EV-truck supporters are worried about the carrots.
The more than $1.1 billion that Los Angeles received under Biden covered a wide array of vehicles and infrastructure. Through three different EPA funding programs, the funding replaces hundreds of diesel trucks, trains and port vehicles, and dedicates hundreds of millions of dollars to building charging stations.
Now the money seems either frozen or precariously unreliable, depending on who the recipient is.
“It is unclear how the recent actions by the administration will impact the award,” said AQMD in a statement to E&E News about its $500 million grant. “The federal government payment system has been in flux, and changes throughout the day and day to day.”
The Los Angeles Port’s $412 million grant is all about replacing diesel engines with electric ones. The port’s tenants, including some of the world’s largest shipping lines, will use the funds to swap out their diesels. The port sees the vehicles as a first step toward eliminating the facility’s diesel emissions by the end of the decade.
All told, the port’s grant is meant to buy more than 300 yard tractors, 56 mobile cranes and 25 forklifts, and install 300 charging ports, along with providing incentives for fleet owners to purchase 250 electric drayage trucks. Lisa Wunder, the port’s acting director of environmental management said, “You’re looking at almost a quarter of our equipment.”
A total of 55 U.S. ports received a total of $3 billion under the same program, most of it to buy equipment similar to Los Angeles’. EPA’s withholding of the purse strings is starting to have an impact.
“We are currently delaying any activities related to this grant,” said Ashley Sumner, a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, which received a $110 million award to buy electric trucks, locomotives and other equipment at Salt Lake City’s intermodal terminal.
That large amount of money speaks to the price of the vehicles, which are more expensive because they are not yet made at large scale. According to ICCT, the average price of a battery-electric truck last year was almost $429,000 and a hydrogen truck $504,000, while a comparable diesel costs almost $171,000..
“It’s an investment. It’s a first step. It’s not going to completely solve the problem,” said Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragán, who represents the area around the port. She sponsored a 2021 bill that became the template for clean-ports funding in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Meanwhile, AQMD, whose mission is to clear the LA Basin’s air, got a $500 million grant meant to bring a different set of vehicles on the road. Of that, almost $468 million is going to diesel replacement. Its top-line item is heavy duty vehicles, aiming to build over 1,000 medium and heavy-duty vehicle charging stalls, 18 electric locomotives, and deploy 800 big trucks, including 70 heavy-duty trucks.
The grant came from an almost $5 billion pot from another IRA program called Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, or CPRG. Those grants are meant for states, cities and other localities to prepare and implement plans to reduce climate-warming gases and other pollutants. Again, Los Angeles was the biggest recipient.
AQMD’s goal is to eliminate 12 million tons of carbon emissions over 30 years, and 30 tons of diesel particulate matter each year.
Yet a third program — again, the largest of its kind from Biden’s EPA — was part of a $7 billion award under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, another IRA creation that sends federal funds to green banks and other credit institutions, which make loans to organizations that reduce climate-harming emissions.
The recipient, a nonprofit coalition called Climate United, intends to direct $250 million to help the purchase of 500 zero-emissions drayage trucks in the Los Angeles area, said Michael Grossman, Climate United’s chief investment officer.
Those trucks are meant to solve a hidden but thorny problem: Zero emissions trucks are so new and rare that no one knows what a used one should cost. Absent that information, traditional truck lenders are unwilling to offer good credit terms to truckers who buy or lease them. Since the vehicles are too expensive to buy without a loan, fleet owners are reluctant to go electric.
“The reason that no one is buying heavy-duty electric trucks is because no one is financing them,” Grossman said.
Climate United’s goal is to finance trucking companies to purchase 500 trucks — with subsidies amounting to $500,000 a truck — and then arrange for their sale four years from now, so the market can learn what that used-vehicle price is.
However, that program is also on hold. Organizations that received grants from the greenhouse gas fund are unable to access funds through Citibank. Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said he is working with the Justice and Treasury departments to cancel the funds.
“We can’t buy any trucks, which we were on the brink of doing,” said a Climate United spokesperson, who asked to remain anonymous because of the controversy.
For two of the recipients, funding rules may mean they can wait out a period of uncertainty.
The LA Port and the air-quality regulator, whose grants are collectively worth $912 million, don’t just have EPA money landing in their bank accounts. They get reimbursed by the feds once vendors have billed them — in other words, when vehicles and charging stations have been bought. That process could take months or years.
“We’re moving full steam ahead with everything we would have been doing otherwise, and our goals and priorities remain,” said Wunder, of the LA Port.
Losing the grants isn’t the end of the line for electric trucks, whose benefits may come to outweigh their disadvantages over time.
“The transition will slow, that’s for sure, but it’s not going to stop,” said Jack Symington, who led a study of heavy-duty truck-charging for the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, a public-private partnership.
The ports “were incredibly excited about the opportunity, and they are still hoping they can make the case that those funds should still be invested in their projects,” said John Boesel, the CEO of CALSTART, a nonprofit that is using some grant funds to provide EV discounts to trucking companies. “But they’re very concerned and alarmed that that funding may go away.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story had outdated information from the Port of Los Angeles on the state of the port’s grant.
