Boycott U.S. goods? OK, Canada. Tariff retaliation is warranted. But American ideas? No reason for a boycott there. Some of those ideas are pretty good. And duty-free.
Consider freight transportation electrification.
California is. But the West Coast blue state is doing more than considering. It has an action plan with destinations, road maps, and arrival times.
Worth importing, don’t you think? No tariffs to evade; no reciprocal levies to trigger.
Here’s the plan: the I-10 Zero-Emission Freight (ZEF) Corridor pilot project. Spearheading it is the Smart Freight Centre (SFC), a Netherlands-based global non-profit organization focused on freight sector efficiency and sustainability. It is leading a coalition that includes AIT Worldwide Logistics, DB Schenker (DVS.CO), Maersk (CPH:MAERSK-B), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), and PepsiCo (Nasdaq:PEP).
Its I-10 goal is to accelerate long-haul electric truck use on the Los Angeles-to-El Paso freight and commuter transportation artery. That’s ambitious in a country with an anti-EV presidential administration.
Ambitious and laudable, considering how much land-based freight movement contributes to air pollution.
Leaving aside the climate change hysteria that air pollution generates, reducing it is good for the environment and communities.
Transportation, after all, is North America’s largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, and freight movement is a major contributor to transportation’s 28% share of the continent’s GHG total.
According to the SFC, 10% of North America’s vehicles are medium and heavy-duty trucks, but they account for 30% of transportation-related GHG, 45% of nitrogen oxide, and more than 50% of fine particulate matter emissions.
So, any meaningful reduction in truck pollution would improve quality of life, especially along heavily travelled cargo corridors.
The I-10 is a good place to start.
It’s included in the U.S. National Zero-Emission Freight Corridor Strategy’s Phase 1 ZEF targets for transportation arteries servicing Long Beach-Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle-Tacoma and other major container ports.
The I-10’s daily truck count is estimated at around 16,700.
The San Pedro Bay port complex generates a lot of that California-to-Texas traffic. Its Los Angeles-Long Beach terminals annually handle approximately 20 million 20-foot-equivalent units (TEUs). That makes San Pedro Bay the world’s ninth busiest container hub. Trucks carry roughly 50% of the containers that flow into and out of the ports’ container terminals.
So, whichever way you want to calculate it, a lot of GHG emissions are generated along the I-10.
The SFC’s goal is 30% zero-emission road freight by 2030 and 100% by 2040 globally.
Reaching that goal will require navigation around political and practical roadblocks.
But Rome was not built in a day, and some key building blocks en route to that goal are in place.
For starters, the U.S. ZET (zero-emission truck) fleet has risen to around 30,000. Not a lot, considering that the country’s overall fleet of commercial trucks is around 13 million, but the ZET number is 10 times what it was five years ago. Prospective buyers today have roughly 120 ZET models to choose from.
The ZEF corridor strategy is also prioritizing infrastructure deployment in and around freight hubs and freight corridors.
And electric truck recharging infrastructure continues to expand in California.
As reported in a previous Substack Shipping News dispatch, the most recent example is the April 22 unveiling of a charging depot for electric trucks servicing the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex. The Ontario, California, facility is a joint project of North American supply chain company NFI Industries Inc. and Prologis Inc.’s (NYSE:PLD) Prologis Mobility charging-as-a-service platform.
The U.S. National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization commits the United States to identifying roadmaps and actions to achieve at least 30% zero-emission medium and heavy-duty truck sales by 2030 and 100% by 2040.
Canada also aims to have 100% ZET sales by 2040.
But, unlike the U.S., it does not have a comprehensive national vision for long-haul electric truck corridors.
America has the blueprint for that initiative – duty-free.
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