President Biden’s Veto Protects Public Health

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Biden today vetoed a Republican-led repeal of public health and clean air rules that his administration finalized in December 2022. EPA’s Heavy-Duty NOx Final Rule applies nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions standards to new medium- and heavy-duty diesel vehicles sold in model years 2027 and later, the first update to the standards in over 20 years. The new standards on NOx emissions are more than 80% stronger than current standards according to the EPA.

“President Biden has yet again stood against attempts to undermine public health and supported our ongoing move to cleaner vehicles,” said Elizabeth Gore, Environmental Defense Fund’s senior vice president for political affairs. “The EPA’s commonsense protections will minimize health harms and save lives all across the country.”

Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles like freight trucks and buses are just 10% of all the vehicles on our roads, but they are responsible for the majority of health-harming pollution from the transportation sector, including NOx pollution.

In total, the EPA estimates these new protective NOx standards will prevent almost 3,000 deaths and numerous hospitalizations and respiratory illnesses each year by 2045.

In April, EDF released new research showing that some 15 million people live within a half-mile of a warehouse in 10 states across the country. The report, Making the Invisible Visible: Shining a Light on Warehouse Truck Air Pollution, provides a window into the burden of truck-related air pollution exposure experienced by people living in close proximity to warehouses. In many states, Black, Latino, Asian and American Indian communities and areas of low wealth are disproportionately exposed to this pollution.

Clean vehicle provisions in the president’s clean energy plan are already changing the transportation landscape and dramatically reducing the cost of zero-emitting medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, with companies already spending tens of billions of dollars to manufacture and deploy clean commercial vehicles.

President Biden has been overwhelmingly successful at defending the clean energy and public health progress ushered in by his administration. In debt limit negotiations, House Republican negotiators aimed to rollback progress already underway from the president’s clean energy plan, but they were ultimately unable to undo any of the president’s clean energy plan after threatening to default on the federal government’s debt obligations.