This National Truck Driver Appreciation Week, Sierra Club is thanking Ben Vasquez who keeps goods flowing through the southern California region. Ben delivers janitorial supplies, paper towels, toilet paper, and cleaning solutions to supermarkets, churches, hospital schools, and small businesses. He knows first hand how essential it is for the community to get their supplies and how important it is for drivers to also be protected via electric trucks.
California's freight system, and the nation’s, runs on diesel. Diesel trucks make up only about 6 percent of vehicles on California roads, but they're responsible for an estimated 70 percent of the state's smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution and roughly 80 percent of cancer-causing diesel soot from the transportation sector. That pollution doesn't fall evenly. It concentrates in the communities that live closest to it: along the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through the Inland Empire's warehouse corridors, and across the Central Valley, home to some of the most polluted air basins in the country.
Ben knows that as a driver he breathes that same air, hour after hour, year after year with every delivery and at home because he is from a frontline community.
California has led the nation in setting a course toward zero-emission trucks. But that progress depends on the trucking industry actually showing up for it — not fighting standards like the state's Advanced Clean Trucks framework, and not asking regulators to slow-walk a transition that drivers and neighboring communities can't afford to wait for.
Sacramento has a role to play here too: continuing to defend clean-truck standards, holding fleets accountable, and making sure the communities most exposed to freight pollution have a seat at the table as the rules get written.
Thanking drivers like Ben Vasquez should mean more than a hashtag during one week in September. It should mean cleaner air in the truck cab, cleaner air in the neighborhoods trucks pass through, and an industry that's investing in both. We are thankful to have Ben Vasquez also advocating for the environment on his time off and working on educating others on the importance of clean energy.
This week, we thank California's truck drivers. Beyond it, we're holding the industry — and the state and country — to the promise of a cleaner future.