Electruck Mandate
Good news for miners and diesel refiners: the state of California is going to make it mandatory for commercial trucks to be electric. As previously observed, mandating battery-electric power for more things will result in an increased demand for resources. This will require more mining. And more mining means more diesel fuel for all the equipment that digs up and breaks apart the ores.
But none of that is likely to happen in California. That’s a dirty job that will have to be performed elsewhere, such as the Third World, where it won’t bother any people who matter.
The federal regulators are endorsing the plan, too:
The Environmental Protection Agency approved California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D.) request to phase in a ban on diesel trucks and semi-tractors, which will require all heavy-duty vehicles be electric by 2045. Experts say the ban, part of the Golden State’s attempt to shift appliances to the electric grid, will make life more expensive for Californians.
Ugh! Experts. What do they know? The best intentions paired with clean thoughts will solve all those problems, surely.
Meanwhile, commercial semi-trucks, which can legally weigh up to 20,000 pounds per axle loaded*, will either need exemptions for their battery packs, or else they’ll have to carry a lot less freight per trip. Battery packs are heavy, after all. And the trucks will have to expend significantly more energy just hauling themselves around.
There will either need to be a waiver allowing trucks to be heavier, or else there will have to be more trucks on the road. All this extra weight per axle will wear out the pavement faster, so more petroleum resources will be required for repaving, and doing so more often. The combination of all this extra work and resource consumption will make everything more expensive.
Happy thoughts and dreams of free energy, though: those will remain abundant.
It is conceivable that I’m being too skeptical, and instead acting like some old fogey from around 1880 who thought human flight would remain forever a pipe dream. Perhaps the model of using the brute force of government regulation will make battery-electric everything happen despite the technical and engineering obstacles, and all the additional extraction and refining of even more natural resources will result in greater material abundance. Anyone who had wagered against our species in the past would have lost those bets, after all. Shouldn’t that be the real lesson? That the critics and skeptics carping from the sidelines are just cranky ignoramuses?
Jevons paradox says that as our use of any material resource becomes more efficient, we use more and more of it rather than less and less. So maybe it is simply our destiny to dig up more of the earth’s crust in ever larger mines as we hunt for mineral ore deposits. Thus, government regulations and mandates or not, this is what we would have expected to happen anyway, with justifications thrown in after the fact. Past performance would suggest the odds are better than even that we succeed.
*Edited on April 7, 2023, to provide an accurate vehicle weight. The emailed newsletter from April 6 still contains the original error.
I've heard such stories before but they continue to amaze me.
Hey, Gnito...you are absolutely right about what you wrote today about trucks except for one thing. No biggie, except it's a bit misleading about all that truck tonnage rolling on our highways every day.
Regarding what you wrote about commercial semi-trucks weighing up to 26K#'s when loaded...
An average garden variety 18-wheeler (tractor + trailer) weighs about 15 to 16 tons *empty* and is usually "plated" for 80K#'s (40 tons) GVW (gross vehicle weight), allowing for 50K#'s (25 tons) of cargo, more or less.
Commercial trucks must be plated according to the maximum GVW they will represent when driving loaded on the highway. There are 8 classes of trucks. Trucks weighing up to 26K#'s are class 6 and are almost exclusively "straight trucks" or 'box trucks' (a single vehicle / no trailer). Semi-trucks w / trailers are class 8, along with some really heavy-duty straight trucks. There are heavy haulers with GVW's above 80K#'s, such as gravel trains, live bottom asphalt haulers, steel haulers and heavy equipment movers. These GVW's can be up to and in excess of 160K#'s (80 tons). A 'Michigan Special Weight' in my state is plated for 164k#'s.
There's a plethora of laws, regs and rules regarding truck weight and axle configurations. But rule of thumb...20K#'s per axle max. Let the Weighmaster catch you overweight, and you'll probably get a ticket you'll need to take out a loan to pay. And if they inspect you and find safety issues / violations with the truck while they're at it, you might need a new mortgage.
!0-4 good buddy? Keep your shiny side up and your greasy side down!