Here's a fun fact nobody asked for: heavy-duty trucks make up about 6% of vehicles on U.S. roads but crank out nearly 60% of the soot and smog-forming pollution. Under newly proposed rules, the EPA now wants to make it easier for truck pollution to keep dirtying our air and lungs, and poisoning truck drivers and communities.
In response, GreenLatinos co-led a comment letter with Hip Hop Caucus, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and dozens of allied organizations, urging the EPA to withdraw its proposed rollback of 2027 heavy-duty truck emissions standards. Technically, the proposed rule doesn't change the NOx limits themselves. It just guts everything that makes those limits mean anything: shorter warranty periods, delayed "useful life" requirements, and a "nonconformance penalty" system that lets manufacturers basically buy their way out of compliance for pocket change relative to their revenue. And it swaps mandatory engine derates, which force repairs, for a friendly dashboard notification. We all know how those check-engine lights go.
Truck manufacturers aren't victims here: they're asking for the discount. The proposed nonconformance penalties run as low as $851 to $5,875 per noncompliant engine, which for a company like Cummins works out to somewhere between 0.000004% and 0.000029% of its annual U.S./Canada sales. (Cummins is the largest independent maker of diesel truck engines in the U.S., pulling in over $20 billion in North American sales in 2025 alone.) That's not a deterrent, that's a rounding error, and it lets manufacturers treat pollution penalties as the cost of doing business while truck owners and truck-route-adjacent communities absorb the mortally real costs of deferred repairs and dirtier air.
Nor is this an abstract policy quibble. Latino, Black, and low-income communities disproportionately live near highways, ports, and freight corridors, breathing NOx and particulate levels far above the national average. Diesel exhaust is a Class 1 carcinogen. The standards this proposal weakens were projected to prevent up to 2,900 premature deaths and 18,000 childhood asthma cases every year by 2045, along with thousands of hospital visits and over a million lost school days.
EPA has pegged that public health value at roughly $200 billion, against the mere $12 billion in industry savings it's using to justify the rollback. That's not a close call.
Our ask is simple: withdraw the rule, keep the standards strong, and stop treating our communities' lungs as an acceptable cost of doing business.
Read the full comment letter here.
