Seventeen states — led by Attorney General of Nebraska Mike Hilgers — are suing after California moved to implement new EV mandates.
Hilgers explained to Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater why California’s move is absurd and will affect the supply chain.
The Nebraska AG explained that the move is a regulation from an unelected body called CARB — the California Air Resources Board (CARB).
“And it wasn’t just California, by the way, Mike, it was also the Biden administration’s EPA, but essentially what California said is they said, look, we have the biggest economy, one of the biggest economies in the world. We have really significant ports, if you want to use our ports and you want to truck any goods in the state of California, once this regulation goes into effect, you have to have a certain threshold of electric vehicles for your trucks — the heavy duty trucks,” he said, noting that there are “maybe 100 large semi trucks that are run on batteries in the entire United States,” and more than 16 million diesel-powered trucks in the U.S.
“And the Biden administration, EPA, would accomplish more or less the same thing. These are, at the end of the day, mandates,” he said, explaining that a company’s fleet will have to have a certain number of electric trucks.
“In order to ship our product [in Nebraska], especially to Asia, we have to go to California, and with this, and to do that, you know, it’s hard. … The fleet has to be a certain size, but it’s not very big,” he said, emphasizing that the fleet would have to have a certain percentage of EVs to operate in California.
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“There’s almost no EV trucks. There’s also no charging infrastructure in the entire state of Nebraska. And we have the largest stretch of I-80 in the country. There’s not one — there’s not one of these charging stations,” Hilgers said, noting that a trucking charging station “draws so much power, it’s the equivalent of a small city.”
“It’s not a small thing for anyone — not just Nebraskans,” he added, explaining that the percentage that must be EV depends on the year.
“It starts at about 10 percent” and goes up over time, he said, adding that this can also be misleading, because “they might say, well, you know, you don’t have to be fully implemented until 2030 or 2032.”
“And you might think, well, I have six or seven years but in the world of model years for cars and certainly for tractor trailers where this technology isn’t even proven to be mass produced, we’re not even sure we can get the minerals to mass produce these types of trucks at scale with the batteries. Seven years is really like a blink of an eye,” he said, adding that this is essentially an “overnight transportation transformation of our supply chain.”
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