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Encourage competition and harness market principles to reduce emissions.
Well-designed policies will alter market behavior and spur innovation, helping promote sustainable greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions at the least cost to the economy and households.
- Implement a reasonable, market-based emissions reduction strategy to empower competition and ultimately grow a clean energy economy.
- Restore the Highway Trust Fund to a user-pays system with a short-term fuel tax increase and longer-term vehicle miles traveled fee.
- Impose an emissions surcharge based on the fuel efficiency of vehicles and provide dedicated funding for passenger rail to address transportation-related emissions and support the most environmentally friendly option for moving people over land.
Drive research and adoption of promising new technologies.
Investment in basic and industry-specific research, coupled with the right policies and incentives, will spur innovation to reduce emissions.
- Embrace partnership between government and the private sector and increase funding for ongoing research on alternative fuels and advanced battery storage.
- Expand and support the use of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) through market development programs and tax incentives.
- Provide operational and regulatory flexibilities so industry can test and deploy new technologies.
Allow partnerships between railroads and industry to advance sector-specific progress.
The rail industry has its own unique advantages and challenges in reducing its impact on the environment.
- Ensure railroads can invest in maintaining and sustaining their infrastructure by preserving the current balanced economic regulatory system.
- Allow innovation to guide GHG reductions and avoid prescriptive means for reducing emissions by certain industries — particularly those that have proven untenable, such as catenary electrification of the freight rail network.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) **According to the Texas Transportation institutes 2019 Urban Mobility Report. highway congestion cost Americans $165 billion in wasted time (8,8 billion hours) and wasted fuel (3.3 billion gallons) in 2017.
