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One truck driver is warning that the Biden administration’s radical climate alarmist policies will devastate the trucking industry.
After the Biden administration recently announced harsh new “greenhouse gas” emissions standards, driven by radical climate ideology, a trucker went on Fox Business’s “Varney & Co.” on Monday to critique the disastrous standards.
“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, an Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) board member, told host Stuart Varney. “And what it’s going to do is put lots and lots of truckers out of business.”
Unfortunately, as we know all too well by now, the Biden administration does not seem to care how many businesses — particularly small businesses — it destroys or how many people it impoverishes in its pursuit of authoritarian, woke utopia.
Fox explains that “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.”
Fox explained that the Biden administration’s rules will be aiming for the practically impossible standard of zero-emissions vehicles through progressively harsher restrictions for models from 2026 through 2032. As I have noted before, EV batteries are toxic and rely on abusive child labor for mining, which is often controlled by Communist China. Not only that, but carbon is necessary for all living things, and there is no climate crisis — in fact, alarmists have been wrong in their predictions for over 50 years now — so reaching net carbon is not only impossible but foolish.
Related: Biden’s EPA Rules ‘Hurt Working-Class Americans’
None of these facts interferes with the Biden administration’s woke crusade. The standards apply to various trucks and vehicles, including school buses, garbage trucks, tractor-trailer trucks, and fire trucks. The idea is to make a huge percentage of these vehicles electric by 2032.
Pugh pointed out that it is impossible to provide enough electricity for the electric vehicle (EV) fleet the Biden administration claims to want. “Where are we going to charge them? That’s my first question. There was a company in Juliet, 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 Juliet, Illinois,’” he said.
He also has financial concerns. “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?“ asked Pugh on Fox. “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?” Pugh added that “there’s no way this is going to work.”
Truckers are “concerned about their lives and their livelihood,” Pugh concluded. And with good reason. “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,” he said. More destructive, woke idiocy from the Biden administration.