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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

A combination of economics and policy will force this. California has outlawed new diesel truck sales after 2036, and other states aren’t far behind (you can drag the stragglers along).

Diesel truck pm2.5 emissions are harmful. Carbon emissions are harmful. Adapt or die. PepsiCo and Frito-Lay are already running Tesla Semis in production. The learning curve is bending up. To get better at this, we’ll have to first suck at it, in the aggregate.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/28/california-bans-the-sale...

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/barcu/regact/2022...

https://electrek.co/2023/04/12/tesla-delivers-fleet-tesla-se...

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Most states won’t be banning diesel trucks any time soon because EVs are more expensive in most scenarios and they don’t want their citizens to be poorer. The same is true of most countries. I agree with the comment above. This will be solved when EV trucks are definitively cheaper. There are already limited use cases where this is true. Technology is the solution here, not draconian legislation.

You only have to have enough of the market ban them to cause a death spiral where manufactures won’t build new fossil vehicles. This locks in the policy goal, it forces the supply chain to reconfigure.

No one cares if the dakotas don’t ban them if no one will build them for just their market.

Think in systems. Find lynch pins and apply maximum force. It’s either a climate emergency or it’s not, and if it is, treat it like an emergency.

Right, but it would make it more expensive to ship, which makes pretty much everyone in that state poorer. States do not want this.

Yes. Humanity has been living on credit essentially for the last century through cheap fossil fuels. No one likes having to pay true costs for what they want. We’ll innovate (as we’ve clearly done with renewables, storage, and heat pumps to name a few tech) and grit our teeth in equal measures as we unfuck our enegy systems. What’s the alternative? Not? I admit it is an inconvenient truth. But the bill has come due.

If the poor cannot afford the transition, fix this with policy. We have the aggregate system wealth. Allocate accordingly.

Every time i see such emotionally charged language about what we must sacrifice for the environment I think "there is no way this person grows any of their own food". That is the kind of change and sacrifice that needs to be made.

Part owner in a family farm that raises steer as well as cash crops, and occasionally assist with fall harvesting ops when short handed.

Edit (throttled, replying here): Growing your own food for self sufficiency is an unreasonable ask and challenging at best for your average citizen. Check out how many acres and the work involved for a family of four’s annually nutritional needs. It simply doesn’t scale (no pun intended), although it can work for those with ample land and no time commitments.

Then why aren't you pushing the "grow your own food" mantra rather than the "get rid of fossil fuels" mantra. We wouldn't need such volumes of liquid fuels if not for industrial agriculture and transportation of food. That seems like much lower hanging fruit than eliminating fossil fuels.

How is it lower hanging fruit? If people move out into the country, then non-food goods will have to be transported to them instead. You're just swapping one problem for another.

You can grow surplus food in the yard of a single family dwelling. No one has to move anywhere.

This is like suggesting the solution to plastic pollution is recycling and reduction by individuals. You can't regulate your way to changing people's behavior, but you can regulate away the source of the problem.

Individual action isn't the solution to a systemic problem, because there's more incentive to cause the problem than to fix it. Individual action requires time, money and effort on behalf of the individual, whereas the ones causing the problem have financial incentive to continue causing it, in greater amounts.

No need to have to grow all their own food, any kind of a supplement at all is a positive.

Plenty of single family dwellings with grass yards.

And time commitments/work involved? I guess they aren't serious about climate change. This just reinforces my original point. Screeching about climate change but unwilling to do any of the work or make any _real_ sacrifices.

It only takes a few hours a week to operate a backyard garden that produces more than even a large family can consume.

Increasing density to the point where folks don't have a yard to grow produce in would be even more positive than families growing a small amount of produce that still wouldn't cover their nutritional needs. That's also a real sacrifice, and like your proposal, it's not one that would be accepted, and not one that meets the needs of varied people.

You're taking an extreme, untenable, position as an alternative to an incremental solution that generally fits everyone's needs at a slightly higher cost.

Electrification is inevitable.

If the states want to avoid costly shipping, what would they do if someone published some research suggesting that "Heavy electric trucks cheaper than diesel goods transport"?

This situation happened already with vehicles. California used to get special cars because of their strict emissions regulations. Now every car has "50 state legal" emissions because A) more states signed onto the California standards, B) it was cheaper to build one vehicle to the strictest standards than to make two for a single market.

What's the point in running a diesel semi when it can't be used to make deliveries to key states in the country? That will force a "relay" model in the freight industry which kills point-to-point delivery, where diesels deliver to a border state and an EV semis runs the last leg. Once that happens, then it becomes economical to run more EV semis between diesel relays, or add rail depots to the relays for ultra-low cost transport over long distances, then EVs for the last leg.

The diesel truck industry is going to die slowly, then all at once.

A figure that I've seen bandied about is that there are 17 states that have already adopted rules based on some portion of the CARB advanced clean transportation rules, and that those states represent I think 35% of the population and 50% of the economic activity in the US. That is less definitive than saying that all of these states will adopt the same rules (like the most recent Advanced Clean Fleets rule). But it's still enough that fleet operators, government procurement officers, and vehicle manufacturers are investing in zero emission vehicles and infrastructure faster than they would without those regulations.

>No one cares if the dakotas don’t ban them if no one will build them for just their market.

New producers of diesel vehicles would show up to cater to those markets. Econ 101.

>Think in systems. Find lynch pins and apply maximum force. It’s either a climate emergency or it’s not, and if it is, treat it like an emergency.

Very emotionally charged rhetoric there. That kind of action would result in bifurcation of the market. Balkanization. Separate economies. That sort of thing.

Developing a new vehicle is quite a substantial fixed cost.

So I think what will happen is that a few existing car manufacturers decide they're OK with being a larger share of a smaller market. Or else a new/adjacent player buys out legacy IP and operations while the original manufacturer focuses on EVs. Or there's a bunch of remanufacturing going on to keep hydrocarbon vehicles running.

Either way, there'll be quite... boutique prices.

It is a balancing act.

> they don’t want their citizens to be poorer

If this was true, we would have walkable and bike able cities...

I feel like there is a lot of misinformation when it comes to bans. No one is coming to your house to take away your existing cars and trucks as far as I know. We are talking about disincentivizing new sales after a certain date.

If passenger cars move to electric, wouldn’t that push diesel pricing down for the truck industry?

Best I can figure, Big Oil pricing is based on what the market will bear. Versus in response to supply, demand, cost of production, and so forth.

Primary evidence is their profitability.

Every couple of years, some politician gets some press for initiating an investigation into price gouging. If a hearing actually happens, no one ever makes the mistake of saying anything concrete.

Nothing ever changes.

And now we have analysis which shows that 50% (?) of recent consumer price inflation is just Big Oil charging more.

And nothing will change.

Silver lining is that price gouging will hasten switch to EVs, so yay for small victories.

(FWIW, my uncle works in a refinery making diesel. He couldn't explain pricing. So what hope do noobs like me have of lifting the veil?)

That really isn't true: supply is very important, which is why OPEC tries to restrict it and things fall apart when Russia pumps too much or a Saudi Sheik decides to buy a new private jumbo jet. Also, the cost of production in the Americas is high enough that it isn't even profitable to bother unless oil is over $100/barrel.

My guess is that things won't change as much as diesel fuel becomes more niche in terms of distribution, but the pressure will be against future price rises, especially if that hastens the move to EVs. The Saudis have to sell their oil before there is no demand for it.

You're certainly correct; price of gasoline (petrol) tracks with crude oil.

I meant to read up on govt's allegations of price gouging (profiteering), to maybe understand what's going on, but got distracted.

So many outrages, so little time.

Cheers.

> Frito-Lay

Makes sense when your cargo is air.

And yet the context was:

> PepsiCo and Frito-Lay

Which I would assume that the PepsiCo product is about as heavy and dense as you could expect in normal freight scenarios, being liquids.

Well PepsiCo doesn't only make Pepsi, they own so many different brands it's entirely possible that what they're transporting with the EV fleet isn't a drink.

Huh, amongst all the other news, I had missed that any Tesla Semis actually existed, let alone had been delivered…

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