Carrie Sheffield: Biden Is Waging a War on Truckers and Everyone Will Pay the Price

President Joe Biden rightly announced a ban on Russian energy imports Tuesday — though only after a bipartisan group in Congress twisted his arm. Biden had resisted the move, despite the purchases funding Vladimir Putin’s deadly Ukraine invasion, worried it would further boost gas prices (and further tank his polling).

But he’s doing plenty to jack up prices through his policies here at home. On Monday, his own Environmental Protection Agency announced it wants to slap new rules on tractor-trailers, buses, delivery vans and moving trucks. The regs, aimed at cutting nitrogen oxide and carbon pollution, will make life harder not only for working-class truck and bus drivers, our essential backbone already exhausted by COVID fatigue — they’ll hit all American shoppers hard.

As Climate Depot’s Marc Morano put it, “US climate sanctions on Americans have more impact than US sanctions against Russia.” 

The EPA move toward “zero-emission vehicles in the heavy-duty fleet” will spike driving costs right as transportation professionals are facing a fuel crisis. It will make everything in the supply chain more expensive when we’re already seeing record inflation. The Independent Women’s Forum tracks a market basket of typical family goods each month, and we’ve seen food costs explode in the last year: Bacon is up 18%, beef 16%, eggs 13% and bread 6%.  

Poor and middle-class families are hurt the most by Biden’s failed energy policies and obsession with the Green New Deal. They spend a higher percentage of their family budget on consumer goods carried by these trucks. Families just below the poverty line fork out 10.2% of their budget for food at home, while households with annual incomes over $150,000 spend just 5.4% on it.

Team Biden simply doesn’t care that it’ll hurt poor and middle-class families at a vulnerable time. Former Obama-Biden Treasury official Mark Mazur said the quiet part out loud last month: “We don’t want lower prices for fossil-fuel buyers, we prefer higher prices,” to achieve “climate change goals.” Mazur was referring to a possible gas-tax holiday, but his comments apply to a range of Biden policies.  

Get the latest updates in the Russia-Ukraine conflict with The Post’s live coverage.

The EPA claims this new rule will annually prevent “up to” 2,100 early deaths, 18,000 cases of childhood asthma and 78,000 lost days of work. But its assumptions are based on highly disputed cost-benefit analyses that overstate the assumed cataclysmic risks and underestimate consumer harm. 

And of course environmentalists, some of the most violent activists alive, say the EPA doesn’t go far enough, demanding it push for even more regulations to not just punish gas-powered trucks but promote electric-powered ones.

Andrea Vidaurre, co-founder of the People’s Collective for Environmental Justice in Southern California, told The Washington Post she was angry at Biden “for pushing for more hours of operation at the Los Angeles port amid supply-chain bottlenecks.” Yes: A liberal, coastal elite is angry the plebeians desire relief as their hard-earned dollars shrink before their eyes as the cost of everything spikes.

Similarly, Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg touted a $5 billion taxpayer-funded electric-vehicle charging network, claiming “rural to urban to suburban communities can all benefit from the gas savings of driving an EV.” What a Marie Antoinette “Let them eat cake” moment. The average Kelley Blue Book transaction price for an electric vehicle is $56,437, far higher than the median per capita income of $34,103.  

Biden’s EPA move coincides with his continued assaults on North American oil and gas producers: discouraging domestic fracking, shutting down the Keystone pipeline, banning new oil and gas leases on public land. Meanwhile, the prez continues begging foreigners in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to produce more oil. As Nick Freitas, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates put it, “Apparently buying oil from countries that hate us is ‘environmentally friendly.’”

While squeezing Putin as hard as possible is praiseworthy — and it’s heartening to see our UK and continental allies commit to phasing out Russian energy imports also, though too slowly — Biden is showing he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Don’t slap your truckers and bus drivers with Green New Deal regulations while they’re suffering through record energy-price spikes. Let common sense rule the day. 

Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.

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