The Wreckers
Trump prepares to loosen Sacramento’s death grip on the national transportation sector.
“This is not the United States of California.” – Chris Spear
A tow truck driver is killed approximately every three weeks in the US. Among small businesses, towing company operation is one of the toughest. Despite the critical role of maintaining road and highway safety, finding qualified workers willing to do the job is, quite obviously, a significant challenge. Mix in intense competition, high startup costs, and the need to be on call 24/7, and one wonders why anyone would embark on such a commercial venture.
Compounding the challenge is the ever-present regulatory state, and no state exerts its regulatory reach more persistently than California. Thanks to a congressional carve-out in the Clean Air Act, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) wields disproportionate influence over a wide range of industries. Given the size of California’s market and the several states that have pledged to follow its regulations, the transportation sector is effectively at the mercy of the progressive far left.
CARB derives its powers from specific waivers granted to it by the EPA, and no waiver is ever permanently overturned. In the waning weeks of the Biden administration, whoever was in charge decided to radically alter the nation’s car and trucking fleets with a set of new ones:
“The Biden administration on Wednesday approved California’s trailblazing rules that would set stricter-than-federal emissions standards, in a bid to ban gas car sales by 2035.
In doing so, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted two requests from the California Air Resources Board for waivers that would allow for the implementation of two rules: the Advanced Clean Cars II regulations for light-duty vehicles and a low-nitrogen oxide regulation for heavy-duty highway and off-road vehicles and engines.”
With a foresight characteristic of a central planner, CARB’s latest edicts suffer from a few flaws, notable among them being that California’s tow truck industry will soon be without access to new vehicles:
“Due to the CARB’s passage of the State’s Advanced Clean Truck (ACT) regulation, towing and recovery trucks will no longer be assembled or sold in California once 2024 truck inventories are depleted. Truck manufacturers have not developed electric truck chassis that meet towing and recovery truck performance and safety requirements, and towing companies can’t purchase diesel-powered trucks built before January 2024. This catch-22 threatens small businesses, jobs, and motorists.”
Although industry participants widely assume that President Trump will revoke these waivers, the history of such attempts suggests a significant political battle ahead. It also remains uncertain whether Congress will be capable of intervening, as the legislative hurdles may be higher than most suspect. Let’s pull apart the wreckage and examine how this might play out.