Photo by iStock.com/Willowpix
People often speak about how the climate crisis will affect future generations as a reason for taking action, and that is true and important. Today’s young people deserve to inherit a planet that isn’t characterized by ever-worsening climate disasters. But the reality is, we are experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis now. Just last month, the Northeast faced devastating impacts from Hurricane Ida, which killed 44 people and left more than 150,000 homes without power across New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
As an organizer working in New York on a range of climate issues, from cleaning up our transportation systems to stopping new fossil fuel projects, I know there’s lots we can do to shift the trajectory away from climate catastrophe. Every single action we take can save lives in this generation and the generations to come.
Pollution from transportation specifically is our nation’s and New York’s worst offender when it comes to the climate crisis. Transportation contributes a striking 36 percent of total climate-disrupting pollution, as well as a significant bulk of dangerous air pollution.
The Empire State has half a million registered medium- and heavy-duty trucks. Although they account for just 12 percent of vehicles on the road, they emit disproportionate amounts of climate-disrupting pollution and toxic air pollutants such as nitrogen oxide and particulate matter. Many of these pollutants are linked to increased rates of asthma, cancer, and even premature death -- health burdens that fall most heavily on communities of color, as they are usually closest to highways and high-traffic corridors.
Changing the status quo of our transportation systems represents the biggest opportunity to help combat the climate crisis and clean up the air in neighborhoods across New York, so all New Yorkers can breathe easier.
For climate, for health, for environmental justice: We must electrify New York’s dirty fossil-fuel powered trucks.
Environmental justice, public health, transportation, clean energy, and environmental advocates spent months this year urging New York to ditch dirty trucks and put forward an Advanced Clean Trucks rule, which would require manufacturers to sell an increasing percentage of new electric trucks each year through 2035. The ACT rule would be the strictest truck emission standards for manufacturers in the United States.
A recent study shows the huge public health, economic, and climate benefits adopting the ACT rule would bring to New York by 2050:
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Prevent 231 hospital visits and 237 premature deaths
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Avoid 155,116 of lost work days from respiratory illnesses
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Achieve billions in state public health savings
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Slash greenhouse gas emissions by 64 million metric tons
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Add thousands of new jobs and GDP growth of $453 million
In April, over one thousand Sierra Club members in New York submitted public comments in support of clean trucks. Sierra Club members and supporters also signed onto coalition letters, published letters to the editor, and met with agency leaders to demonstrate our support for swift action to clean up New York’s trucks.
And we made tremendous progress toward our goal! Two weeks after being sworn into office, Governor Kathy Hochul, along with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, announced that New York would consider adopting the ACT rule.
In addition to the Department of Environmental Conservation kicking off the public comment period for the ACT rule, Governor Hochul recently signed a bill requiring that new truck sales by 2045 must be 100 percent electric.
But the ACT rule isn’t over the finish line yet.
Let’s do it, New York!