A valve failure on an Enbridge Energy oil pipeline in Wisconsin caused a spill that dumped some 69,000 gallons of oil into the ground.
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The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in September it will distribute $7.3 billion in grants and loans for rural clean energy projects serving 23 states. (Photo courtesy of the National Center for Appropriate Technology and the Agrisolar Clearinghouse | USDA)
Pennsylvania wants to remain a manufacturing powerhouse. But state leaders also want to reduce climate change-causing emissions from steel mills and other industrial facilities, while cutting back the toxic pollutants that cause health problems in nearby neighborhoods.
Thanks to a nearly $400 million investment from the federal government, the state is preparing a massive plan to help industrial operators upgrade to new technologies and switch to cleaner fuel sources.
“Pennsylvania was one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, and now we’ve been given the opportunity to lead the nation in the industrial decarbonization movement,” said Louie Krak, who is coordinating the plan for the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Leaders in every state in the country have their own big plans. North Carolina and neighboring states are preparing to restore wetlands and conserve natural areas along the Atlantic coast. Iowa leaders intend to plant trees in neighborhoods that lack shade. Local governments in Texas plan to help residents install solar panels on their rooftops. And Utah is readying to purchase electric buses and reduce methane emissions at oil and gas operations.
All of these plans are backed by federal money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law passed by Congress in 2022. But former President Donald Trump, who has called climate change measures a “scam” and vowed to rescind “unspent” funds under the law, could throw much of that work into chaos if he retakes the White House.
Legal experts say Trump couldn’t outright cancel the law without an act of Congress. But climate leaders say a Trump administration could create extra barriers for grant awards, slow the approval of tax credits and delay loan requests. If the federal support becomes unreliable, projects could lose financing from the private sector and cease to be viable.
“Even if the money is technically safe, we would definitely expect to see agencies [in a Trump administration] dragging their feet,” said Rachel Jacobson, lead researcher of state climate policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank.
Federal agencies have already announced plans to award $63 billion — mostly in the form of grants — to states, nonprofits and other entities for a host of projects to fight climate change, according to Atlas Public Policy, a climate-focused research group. Many Republican-led states have, for the first time, drafted plans to fight climate change in order to compete for the money.
In addition, the feds are rolling out billions more in loans and tax credits aimed at similar projects. States say the mix of funding sources and financial incentives that will soon be available could supercharge efforts to fight climate change and create green jobs.
Many states whose projects have been approved say they’re urging the feds to issue their funding before the election.
“There’s a risk that an incoming administration could cancel our agreement,” said Krak, adding that Pennsylvania is hoping to finalize its funding award this fall.
Another $30 billion from the law is still up for grabs, much of it aimed at reducing emissions in the agricultural sector. And agencies have just begun offering loans and tax credits to provide hundreds of billions more in financing.
“So many states have climate plans for the first time [because of the federal law],” said Ava Gallo, climate and energy program manager with the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, a collaborative forum for state lawmakers. “Even states that weren’t supportive of the Inflation Reduction Act are certainly touting these projects.”
In July, Utah learned that it would be receiving nearly $75 million to carry out its climate plan. The program will pay for electric school and transit buses, help residents purchase electric vehicles and install equipment to reduce methane emissions at oil and gas operations, among many other components.
By 2050, the investments are expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.4 million metric tons, said Glade Sowards, who is coordinating the plan for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. Sowards said the plan was also designed to reduce pollution that harms public health.
Even states that weren’t supportive of the Inflation Reduction Act are certainly touting these projects.
– Ava Gallo, climate and energy program manager with the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators
North Carolina is focused on protecting natural areas. The state filed a joint plan with Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia that is set to receive $421 million in federal funding. The coalition plans to conserve and restore more than 200,000 acres in coastal areas in the four states. While the natural lands are valuable for pulling carbon from the air, the funding will also help to expand state parks and protect residents from flooding.
Like many of the state projects supported through the climate law, the four-state plan has been announced as a recipient but the funding agreement is still being finalized. State leaders are urging the feds to complete that this fall.
“We want to get this done quickly for two reasons: one, so we can get the work underway, but two, to make sure that the money will be there [before a new administration could threaten it],” said Reid Wilson, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
The federal law also will pay for trees in urban areas, where they can reduce the dangerous “heat island” effect and limit stormwater runoff and air pollution. Iowa earned a pair of grants totaling more than $5 million to increase tree canopy in its cities.
“We’ve never had this level of funding before,” said Emma Hanigan, urban forestry coordinator with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “We have a really low canopy cover, one of the lowest in the nation.”
Another nationwide program is set to offer funding in all 50 states to help residents put solar panels on their rooftops or buy into community solar operations. In Texas, a coalition of municipalities and nonprofits, led by Harris County (which includes Houston), earned a nearly $250 million award to carry out that work.
The program will largely focus on disadvantaged communities, with a requirement that solar projects reduce participants’ energy bills by at least 20%. Leaders in Texas expect the investment to reach about 28,000 households.
States are also tasked with distributing rebates to help residents with their home energy needs. Wisconsin was the first state to bring its rebate program online, with $149 million in funding. Residents can receive up to $10,000 to improve insulation, upgrade appliances or install electric heat pumps. Over time, they will see greater savings in the form of lower energy bills.
“It’s nice [for a contractor] to be able to sit at the kitchen table and say, ‘You’re getting $3,000 of work here, but the state is paying $2,800,’” said Joe Pater, director of the Office of Energy Innovation with the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin.
Three other states (Arizona, New Mexico and New York) have rebate programs up and running, and others are finalizing applications. Indiana is among the many states awaiting federal approval to launch its program. The state expects to offer $182 million in rebates starting in early 2025. Greg Cook, communications manager with the Indiana Office of Energy Development, said the state is hoping to execute its plan regardless of the election outcome.
The climate law also has boosted “green banks,” which are state or nonprofit-run institutions that finance climate-friendly projects. The nonprofit Coalition for Green Capital received $5 billion of the federal money, which it will use to build a network that includes a green bank in each state, said Reed Hundt, the group’s CEO.
Michigan Saves, a nonprofit bank, expects to receive $95 million as a sub-award from the coalition. Chanell Scott Contreras, the president and CEO of Michigan Saves, said the “unprecedented” funding will enable the bank to expand its work, which includes helping low-income residents weatherize their homes and financing electric vehicle chargers and solar installations.
The grants given out to states and other entities are just the start. The climate law supersized a federal loan program for clean energy projects, bringing its lending authority to $400 billion. And a new mechanism known as elective pay will now allow states, cities and nonprofits to receive the clean energy tax credits that have long been available to the private sector.
Climate advocates say many of the plans that states are setting in motion rely on the financing and tax rebates — components of the law that are most vulnerable to political interference.
“If an administration wanted to completely thwart the ability of [the Department of Energy] to make those loans, they could do so,” said Annabelle Rosser, a policy analyst with Atlas Public Policy, which has been tracking the rollout of the climate law. “That could be cut off at the knees.”
Meanwhile, many states are relying on the new tax credit to support plans such as electrifying state vehicle fleets and installing solar panels on public schools. In Washington state, for instance, the Office of Financial Management is coordinating a governmentwide effort to ensure state agencies use elective pay to bolster their climate work.
But climate advocates fear that an Internal Revenue Service led by Trump appointees could stall that work.
“There’s a lot of concern about what [Trump] would do with IRS staffing to limit the ability for them to get the refund checks out,” said Jillian Blanchard, director of the climate change and environmental justice program with Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit focused on human rights. Such delays could “chill hundreds of thousands of projects,” she said.
“I’m not sure he knows that red states are counting on this money too.”
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On June 7, 2023, exactly 2,206 large trucks and buses passed through the intersection of Kedzie Avenue and 31st Street in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.
That’s an average of 1.5 heavy-duty vehicles per minute — much more in the morning and afternoon — rumbling through this crossroads in a dense, residential neighborhood near multiple parks and schools.
The numbers are the results of a groundbreaking truck counting program carried out by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, which is using the information to bolster its demands for electric trucks and an end to development that burdens communities of color with diesel pollution.
The Chicago Truck Data Project, carried out by LVEJO along with the Center for Neighborhood Technology and Fish Transportation Group, used cameras and software to systematically measure the number and types of vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians for 24-hour periods at 35 intersections around the city. The project website launched this spring, and organizers hope to continue compiling, analyzing and modeling truck counts, as well as helping allies carry out similar work in other cities.
“This is the power of community science,” said José Miguel Acosta Córdova, LVEJO transportation justice program manager. “We’ve had to collect this data, when this is data the city should have been doing.”
The highest concentration of truck traffic was just south of Little Village in the Archer Heights neighborhood, where 5,159 trucks and buses passed in a day. A few miles east in the heavily residential McKinley Park neighborhood, in a single day over 4,000 trucks and buses passed, along with more than 800 pedestrians.
“It paints a picture of pedestrian proximity to truck traffic, which is an air pollution concern, and a safety concern,” said Paulina Vaca, urban resilience advocate with the Center for Neighborhood Technology.
In years past, LVEJO members had conducted grassroots manual truck counts — standing on corners to log the frequency of pollution-spewing traffic.
“Unfortunately we weren’t taken seriously by the Department of Planning,” said Vaca. “With [the Chicago Truck Data Project] we wanted to be more systematic with the research. This is hard evidence, hard proof. We wanted community advocates to be able to wield these numbers for organizing efforts, tying them to state-level policies.”
Electrifying trucks is a primary way to reduce truck emissions, protecting public health while reducing carbon emissions, especially as increasing amounts of electricity come from renewables.
LVEJO and other groups have for years been calling on Illinois to adopt California’s standards on clean trucks and zero-emissions vehicles. Only 11 states — none of them in the Midwest — have adopted California’s Advanced Clean Trucks standard, according to analysis by the Alternative Fuels Data Center. The standard requires manufacturers to sell an increasing percentage of zero-emissions trucks through 2035, and includes reporting requirements for large fleets. Seventeen states plus the District of Columbia have adopted California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle standards, which create similar requirements for cars and light trucks. Minnesota is the only Midwestern state to adopt those standards.
A 2022 study by the American Lung Association estimates that if truck fleets electrify by 2050, the cumulative benefits could include $735 billion in public health benefits, 66,800 fewer deaths, 1.75 million fewer asthma attacks and 8.5 million fewer lost workdays. The Chicago area would be among the top 10 metro areas — and the only Midwestern one — that would see the most health benefits from truck electrification, the report found.
The U.S. EPA reports that heavy duty trucks contribute more than 25% of greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector nationwide, though they make up only about 5% of traffic nationally. While greenhouse gases don’t have localized health impacts, such emissions from diesel vehicles come in tandem with particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and other compounds that hurt nearby residents most.
In Illinois, trucks are responsible for 67% of nitrogen oxide pollution, 59% of fine particulate pollution, and 36% of the greenhouse gas emissions from on-road vehicles despite making up only 7% of those vehicles, according to a 2022 study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Cleaning up truck emissions has long been a focus of advocates and policymakers, but progress has been slow.
An August 2021 executive order from President Joe Biden said that, “America must lead the world on clean and efficient cars and trucks,” and called for a rulemaking process for heavy-duty trucks under the Clean Air Act.
In December 2022 the EPA released a new rule regarding nitrogen oxides and other emissions from heavy-duty trucks starting with model year 2027, but environmental justice advocates blasted the rule as not protective enough.
In April 2023, the EPA launched a rulemaking to strengthen curbs on greenhouse gas emissions for heavy-duty trucks manufactured between 2027 and 2032. That led to a final “phase 3” rule governing truck greenhouse gas emissions, published in April 2024 and taking effect June 21.
The final phase 3 rule is billed by the EPA as more protective than the previous rule, but includes a slower phase-in of standards than an earlier phase 3 proposal backed by environmental justice advocates.
Union of Concerned Scientists senior vehicles analyst Dave Cooke wrote in a recent blog post that the phase 3 regulations mean up to 623,000 new electric trucks might hit the road between 2027 and 2032, “with zero-emission trucks making up over one third of all new truck sales by 2032.”
“But that number is highly dependent on manufacturer compliance strategy and complementary policies,” Cooke continued, “and the path to a zero-emission freight sector remains uncertain.”
Cooke fears that electric heavy-duty trucks will be sold primarily in states that have adopted California’s Advanced Clean Trucks rule, leaving fewer available for other states.
“The rule risks having communities of haves (in ACT states) and have-nots (in the remainder of the country),” wrote Cooke, “precisely the sort of situation a federal rule is supposed to ward against.”
Reducing heavy-duty truck emissions has long been a focus for Clean Air for the Long Haul, a national coalition of environmental justice groups including the Wisconsin Green Muslims, South Bronx Unite, the Green Door Initiative in Detroit, WE-ACT for Environmental Justice and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice.
Wisconsin Green Muslims has organized several in-person and virtual events for community members to talk with state and local officials about truck emissions.
Huda Alkaff, co-founder of the organization, noted that their office is on Fond du Lac Avenue, a major thoroughfare plied by truck traffic. Alkaff described the fight for clean air in a blog during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, writing that people can fast from food and even water for limited times but cannot abstain from breathing air.
Alkaff said local leaders would like to do mobile air monitoring and truck counting, similar to LVEJO.
“Learning from each other, that’s our power,” she said.
In Milwaukee residential areas bisected by highway-type roads like Fond du Lac and Capitol Drive, meanwhile, air pollution is compounded by the safety risks posed by trucks.
“Let’s look at the routes, let’s look at the timing, the types of things that might be able to happen with minimum disruption,” she said.
She noted that residents don’t want to endanger the livelihood of truckers who can’t afford to invest in new equipment. But she’s hopeful the transition can be facilitated by federal funding, like recently announced EPA grants of $932 million for clean heavy-duty vehicles for government agencies, tribes and school districts.
In Detroit, construction of a new international bridge to Canada is expected to increase the heavy diesel burden on local residents already affected by trucks crossing the international Ambassador Bridge, as well as heavy industry.
“We have a huge issue with maternal health outcomes because Black moms are living near freeways and mobile sources [of pollution],” said Donele Wilkins, CEO of the Green Door Initiative and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “Birth outcomes are huge issues, asthma, issues with heart disease are elevated in ways they should not be because of exposure to mobile sources.”
The under-construction Gordie Howe International Bridge is aimed specifically at commercial truck traffic, and unlike the Ambassador, it will allow hazardous materials. The new bridge culminates in the Delray neighborhood, a heavily industrial enclave that has a much higher Latino population — 77% — than the city as a whole.
In Detroit, Chicago and other cities, warehouses are a major and growing source of diesel emissions from trucks. A 2023 investigation involving manual truck counts by Bridge Detroit and Outlier Media found that one truck per minute passes homes near an auto warehouse on Detroit’s East Side.
An Environmental Defense Fund study found that in Illinois, 1.9 million people live within half a mile of a warehouse, and Latino people make up 33% of such warehouse neighbors, while they make up only 17% of the total state population. Black people are also disproportionately represented among warehouse neighbors, while white people are underrepresented.
Little Village gained national attention with the closure of a coal plant in 2012, and city officials worked with community members on a stakeholder process to envision alternate uses for the site. Residents envisioned a community commercial kitchen, indoor sustainable agriculture and renewable energy-related light manufacturing as possible new identities.
Many were furious when the site became a Target warehouse, a magnet for truck traffic. LVEJO is now working with elected officials on drafting city and state legislation that would regulate and limit new warehouse development, even as new warehouses are proposed in the area, including a controversial 15-acre plan on Little Village’s northern border.
LVEJO’s Acosta notes that environmental justice is “not only about electrification but land-use reform.”
“The reason why all these facilities are concentrated where they are is because of zoning, historically racist practices,” said Acosta, who is pursuing a doctorate in geography and GIS mapping at the University of Illinois. “We want to completely reform the way we do land-use planning and industrial planning, not forcing our communities to coexist with trucks every day. It’s also thinking about pedestrian and bicyclist access and safety, mobility justice.”
Counting trucks, demanding change: Chicago project aims to quantify heavy-duty vehicle impacts is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.
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