"The EPA clean trucks proposal released this week focuses on cleaner combustion engines, but environmental justice advocates want a zero-emissions transition."
"When Angelo Logan was growing up in the city of Commerce, California, in the 1970s, he remembers how residents used to call the weeks leading up to Christmas the “truck season.”
That’s when 18-wheelers would converge on a manufacturing center nestled between two interstate highways to pick up goods to deliver across the country. The factories eventually closed, but the freeways and the railyard only got busier. Traffic escalated as the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach expanded, and today Commerce is a byway for the busiest international business hub in the United States.
“Now, there is no ‘truck season,’ because truck season is every day,” Logan said. Commerce, with a population that is 95 percent Hispanic, is part of a transportation corridor that state officials say has among the highest health risks in California associated with air pollution."
Marianne Lavelle reports for Inside Climate News March 9, 2022.