As polluters go, diesel-electric trains could be a lot worse. A post on the website of the Institute for Energy Research says that it takes only a gallon of diesel fuel to move a ton of freight 500 miles by train, whereas if you put the same load in your one-ton pickup that gets 15 miles per gallon, or even a semi-trailer that does somewhat better, you will be making a lot more greenhouse gas with the trucks than with the train.
But that hasn’t deterred the California Air Resources Board (hereinafter CARB) from issuing a set of proposed regulations that would effectively shut down diesel-locomotive-pulled trains, not only in California, but quite possibly everywhere else in the U. S. as well. How would it do this?
First off, the regulations are not completely out of touch with reality. The creative types who came up with them recognize that there are not yet any full-scale zero-emission locomotives anywhere in the world, not even in secret labs owned by Elon Musk. So starting in 2026, all train companies will start having to pay into escrow almost a billion dollars each in order to save up to buy these zero-emission (presumably battery-powered) trains that don’t exist today, and may not exist for decades to come, either.
Besides bankrupting small train lines, this will create an economic burden that will raise prices nationwide and put rail transport at a disadvantage that may force more shipments onto truck lines, where they will end up causing more pollution than if the CARB had just sat on its hands and done nothing.
And not all train traffic happens inside California, either. A lot of it carries goods between that state and the rest of the country, and no one thinks that huge switchyards will spring up on the border of the state to change out nasty polluting diesel engines for electric ones to run inside the state. In fact, due to a kink in the original Clean Air Act of 1972, California has a unique privilege to see that its own internal CARB regulations automatically trump any federal regulations, unless someone shows (typically through costly and lengthy litigation) that the CARB regulations are unreasonable. And because California is such a large market, a regulation that is in force there typically has to be accepted by default elsewhere. This is exactly how California automobile pollution standards, which were much stricter than either existing Federal or other state standards, became the de-facto U. S. standard.
And now California is trying to do the same thing with their rail-transportation rules.
According to a report in National Review, during a public-comment period that ended Apr. 22 a huge variety of organizations protested the proposed regulations. These range from the expected (train companies, state and local legislators) to the unexpected (railway labor unions) and downright surprising (two Federal agencies opposed it).
As written, starting in 2030 the regulations require that all locomotives operating in the state must be less than 23 years old, obsoleting many perfectly good engines that can last for 40 years or more. By that same year, only six years from now, half of all new locomotives must be zero-emission, and by 2035, all new locomotives must be electric (or nuclear, or “Back to the Future” flux capacitors, or whatever).
In 1958, during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, that dictator decided that China had to become the world’s largest producer of steel, within five years. The only sensible way to achieve that goal was to study the current large-scale steel industry, figure out what factories and people and training and expertise would be needed, and spend the money it would take to buy the equipment and build the steel mills and blast furnaces to do the job.
But that is not what Mao decided to do. Instead, he called on his citizenry to build “backyard furnaces,” typically a few yards (or meters) in diameter, made of mud bricks and fueled by wood or charcoal. In essence, he asked billions of people to take up steelmaking as a hobby, only a deadly-serious one. So many people were compelled to abandon useful pursuits like farming in order to make backyard furnaces that some authorities think it contributed significantly to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961, in which an estimated tens of millions of people died. And the pig iron that the peasants managed to make was so poor in quality and small in quantity that the whole thing was abandoned a few years later.
The backyard-furnace fiasco is a good example of what happens when a person or organization without the ordinary common sense that (as my grandmother would say) God gave a soda cracker, is endowed with dictatorial powers. The looming disaster awaiting U. S. railways if the CARB railway regulations about zero-emission trains are enacted bears more than a family resemblance to Mao Zedong’s ill-fated backyard foundries.
At least people knew how to make steel, and it was a proven technology. It just wasn’t practical for millions of Chinese peasants to make it on an absurdly small scale with no modern equipment, quality controls, or modern transportation.
It is provably impractical—presently impossible—to make a free-standing electric locomotive that runs on batteries and does what a modern diesel-electric unit does. But that hasn’t stopped the dictators at CARB from cooking up a regulation which, in the best case, will cost U. S. rail companies millions of dollars to fight in court, and billions to comply with in escrow funds in the meantime even if a zero-emission locomotive never comes to pass.
With the proposed CARB railway regulations, we have arrived at the dictatorship of the administrative state. It is no longer merely a future threat—it is here, right now, standing with a battle-ax poised over the neck of the U. S. railway industry. It passed through my mind to encourage the railways to simply refuse to service California once the regulations are in place. See how they like it without trains. This would probably provoke a Federal takeover of the industry, as it did during the Wilson administration in World War I, and the only advantage then would be that the dictatorship would be out in the open for all to see.
But it is already, and I only hope that this ends better than Mao’s backyard furnaces. Right now, I’m not optimistic.
Sources: The Institute for Energy Research article “California Proposes to Ban Diesel Trains and Has Asked EPA For a Waiver” appeared on Mar. 29, 2024 at https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/regulation/california-proposes-to-ban-diesel-trains-and-has-asked-epa-for-a-waiver/. The National Review article “California vs. the World on Zero-Emission Trains” by Dominic Pino appeared at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/california-vs-the-world-on-zero-emissions-trains/. I also referred to the Wikipedia articles “Backyard furnace” and “Great Chinese famine.”
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