This is a career with great earning potential and of great importance to the country and to the economy – one that the country increasingly recognizes as absolutely essential and that can be the basis for supporting a family through an entire working career. But also there are some things that make this a challenging career – that make it tough – and we're very working very hard to address those. If you're entering the career at a time like this, you're entering at a time when my department, and a lot of others, are looking at issues – from the availability of parking to the way people get paid and everything in between – in order to make sure that it's a better career than it's ever been.
This is one of the reasons why I'm glad that the infrastructure package wasn't one dimensional. You remember all those debates we were having two years ago: Is this infrastructure? Is that infrastructure? And there were some people saying, "Well, if it isn't a road or a bridge, it doesn't count." And we were saying the internet is infrastructure, pipes are infrastructure, and the grid is infrastructure, and they're all connected. So, the fact that we're building out more on the grid side, and obviously that's outside my lane – that's the Department of Energy – but we work very closely with them, of course.
We know that you can't have tomorrow's car and truck fleets running on yesterday's grid. That's why we're upgrading the grid. And it's gonna be challenging, there's no question. I sat down with the truckstop owners and they talked about the issues they're going to have with just a different level of load. But, at the end of the day, pound-for-pound, it can also be a lot more efficient than moving liquids all over the country. It's just a transition like we haven't had to make in really in the whole life of the automotive and trucking sectors, which is why this decade is going be very challenging and full of enormous potential, and there's a lot of business opportunity in that too.
The picture for over the road trucking is different than it is for light-duty vehicles and personal cars. What's the same is, obviously, just the imperative in terms of our climate, with not a lot of time and the fact that the choices we make at the policy level can make a difference. So you'll see a lot of our policies are set up in a way that is platform neutral.
On cars, we've placed a pretty big bet on electric, right? But a lot of the regulations you'll see around emissions don't tell you how to get to zero emissions. They just say you've got to get there.
The clean diesel conversation, like the sustainable aviation fuel conversation, is one about how we can bridge to a cleaner place than we've been. If you look at things like some of the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, I think they can really help here. So we get that it's not all the same and there's going to be a lot of particular challenges, but also different opportunities around trucking. Especially because, first of all, unlike a car where your second most expensive possession is one you don't use 96% of the time, trucks are designed to be moving all the time, which means when you have a fuel savings, they pay back a lot more quickly. It's definitely true on the electric side if you look at what's beginning to come onto the market, for the kind of smaller middle markets that these EV semis can operate in.
There are also things in terms of the use pattern of how frequently you're going to the same place, or what happens when you're at warehouses, that actually create a lot of opportunity for lower zero emission refueling. We're not naive about the difference between long distance trucking and what's possible even today for privately-owned light-duty passenger vehicles. But, I think the end of the story has to be the same, which is how we had a transformation that created American jobs that got us to a cleaner climate.
