The cost of the war with Iran is posted at diesel pumps across America. This week, the national average topped $6.50 a gallon , a record and about 75 percent higher than a year earlier. Truckers pay first -- a long-haul driver has paid roughly $15,000 more for diesel since the war began. Then the costs move through freight bills to farms, construction sites, stores and ultimately to the wallets of American families.

The United States produces more oil than any other country but American truckers still pay a price defined by global supply. Disruption in the Middle East, damage to refineries abroad and tight diesel supplies all reach the pump here. Producing oil at home does not insulate the price of diesel from a shock overseas.

Other countries are currently better prepared to deal with the impacts of the high diesel prices than we are.

Start with China. Beijing has temporarily capped fuel prices to soften the blow, but its real advantage is structural. One in four trucks sold in China last year was electric, including 28 percent of heavy freight trucks, and Beijing is pushing toward 40 percent by 2030.

This year, those trucks will save the equivalent of 141 million barrels of oil , as much as China imports from Kuwait. Price caps are a temporary patch, but electric trucks are a permanent hedge.

Chinese manufacturers have begun exporting their electric trucks to the world. In the four months after the war began, its heavy electric truck exports more than doubled, half of them to South and Southeast Asia, regions heavily dependent on Middle East oil. Globally, annual electric truck and bus sales have nearly doubled for the second straight year in 2025, crossing half a million vehicles.

Europe is moving in the same direction. The electric truck market across Europe including the United Kingdom rose about 40 percent in 2025, and the EU now has more than 1,000 charging points built just for trucks. With the continent paying a diesel premium of about €200 million a day across cars and trucks, electric trucks in Germany are now more than a third cheaper to operate than diesel. And Europe’s truck makers face new electric competitors, such as Tesla and BYD, that could capture more than a quarter of its electric heavy truck market by 2030.

The picture in the United States is very different. In the second half of 2025, just 838 new zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty trucks, outside of cargo vans, were deployed nationwide. Electric truck prices here have risen 32 percent, while prices in Europe have fallen 27 percent . The same companies sell trucks on both continents. In one market, they face durable standards and real competition, in the other they do not.

Here the rules have been torn up. In little more than a year, Washington revoked California’s clean truck standards, erased every federal greenhouse gas standard for vehicles, including the first standards for heavy trucks, which I led at EPA, and ended the tax credit that helped fleets buy electric trucks. Those standards would have saved truckers money at the pump, cut pollution and kept American manufacturers competitive.

Sadly, the truck makers did not stand aside. They sued California to escape the Clean Truck Partnership, a 2023 deal they helped negotiate. And as I wrote this spring, Daimler Truck, Volvo Group and Traton went to court to defend the repeal of every federal vehicle climate standard.

These are the same companies that have pledged 50 percent zero-emission truck sales by 2030. Now their customers, most of them small, family-owned businesses, are paying the price at the pump with no alternative in their yards.

Meanwhile, there is still hope as one American company is working to prove it can be done. This week, Tesla opened its Semi factory in Nevada, designed to build 50,000 electric heavy duty trucks a year and bring more than 3,000 jobs to the state.

It began deliveries to customers including PepsiCo, DHL and US Foods. Tesla is quoting about $290,000 for the long-range Semi, well below the roughly $411,000 median price of an electric truck in the US today.

A shippers’ alliance whose founding members include Microsoft and PepsiCo named Tesla its primary supplier for 2,500 electric heavy trucks, an order that would nearly double America’s electric Class 8 fleet. Kenworth and Volvo, whose parent companies are suing California, were named as backup suppliers.

California is leading – Others should follow

California is not backing down in its longstanding mission to be the nation’s climate leader. With 10 other states, it sued to restore its clean truck standards, and the governor ordered state regulators to write a new clean truck rule and to publicly recognize truck makers that keep their commitments. The state is fighting to hold manufacturers to the Clean Truck Partnership and still requires state and local government fleets to buy zero-emission trucks.

Its voucher program has put more than $1 billion toward 11,600 clean trucks and buses for over 2,000 fleets, with up to $120,000 per truck . And a new law signed September 20 requires manufacturers to disclose the prices of electric trucks that receive state incentives, so that the subsidy lowers what truckers pay instead of disappearing into the higher sticker price.

Other states should follow California’s lead and offer loans and purchase incentives that help fleets buy electric trucks, require price transparency and electrify their own public fleets. States, utilities and the private sector must work together to build the charging and grid infrastructure freight needs, from depots to highway corridors. And more of the largest shippers should follow Microsoft and PepsiCo in demanding zero-emission freight.

The major truck makers must do their part, too. Daimler, Volvo, Paccar and Traton, the parent of International, serve American fleets every day, and their electric truck prices have fallen in Europe even as they climbed here. They should drop their lawsuits, honor their commitments, bring down prices, deliver electric trucks at scale and work with states and utilities to put charging where freight moves.

The world’s trucks are going electric. China is already exporting the electric trucks American fleets need to cut their dependence on diesel. The only question is whether we build them here or keep paying at the pump for an administration that is doubling down on fossil fuels and dismantling the policies that would move us towards where the rest of the world is already going.