Justice Comes For Coal-Rolling Trolls As $2B EPA Lawsuit Targets eBay

// There is a place for pickup trucks in American society. The vehicles have utility. As a matter of fact, my old man drives a pickup truck — a sensibly sized Chevy Silverado. He delights in hauling away loads of cleared brush, carting around a canoe to local bodies of water during duck hunting season, and doing various other reasonable things that in rural regions require a truck.

Yet, all it takes is a glimpse at any pickup television advertisement to realize that some Americans have an unhealthy relationship with trucks.  “Are YOU insecure in your masculinity?” the voice of Sam Elliott or whoever might as well just growl directly over quick cuts of a huge truck driving over stuff no one who buys a truck is ever going to drive over: “Then buy this giant metallic gas-guzzling phallus to show everyone what a MAN you really are!”

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Perhaps the dumbest outgrowth of this phenomenon is the concept of “rolling coal.” You probably already know what this is, but just to make sure everyone is up to speed, rolling coal is modifying the exhaust control system of a vehicle, typically a diesel pickup truck, to pump too much diesel into the engine on command so as to spew out a carcinogenic black cloud of soot. The typical coal roller will activate their pollution cannon when passing an electric or hybrid car, or anything else that could vaguely read to a passing motorist as an emblem of liberality, as a form of anti-environmental trolling.

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The whole thing is quite bizarre. Coal rollers lessen their own fuel efficiency at personal expense to spew clouds of poison onto their own communities for the purpose of declaring themselves to be assholes to everyone within visual range.

Because there is apparently a market in the United States for making your neighbors and fellow travelers hate you, selling equipment to transform your rig into a coal-rolling environmental nightmare is big business. Tens of thousands of defeat devices designed to bypass pickup truck emissions systems, and thereby allow a driver to roll coal, are sold every year in the U.S.

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The Department of Justice is looking to change this. Although local laws against rolling coal are spotty and difficult to enforce, the DOJ is trying to cut off the supply side of rolling coal: the agency, on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, just filed a complaint in federal court against online retailer eBay for allegedly facilitating more than 343,000 unlawful sales of vehicle exhaust system defeat devices. The complaint also accuses eBay of unlawfully selling or distributing restricted-use pesticides as well as banned commercial methylene chloride products.

Each sale of a coal rolling kit could land eBay with a $5,580 fine under the Clean Air Act, meaning the retailer could be facing a total penalty of around $2 billion. For context, keep in mind that eBay’s total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 was only $2.5 billion.

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Of course, eBay has denied liability, and said in a public statement that it had successfully removed “more than 99.9% of the listings for the products cited by the DOJ.” Anecdotally, I can attest to eBay being pretty good at removing problematic listings, as I once tried to list for sale on the platform a nunchaku set (two pieces of wood connected by a short length of chain, ‘chuck around and find out) and eBay took that down almost instantaneously.

This suit is only the latest example of federal regulators increasingly showing backbone in taking on big online companies in ways that could meaningfully impact their bottom lines. The eBay coal-rolling lawsuit comes on the heels of an FTC antitrust suit against Amazon and in the midst of a major trial in a DOJ case against Google. The scope of the eBay suit is as significant as its legal context, given that previous fines for companies selling coal-rolling equipment have topped out at around $1 million.

Ford F-Series pickup trucks remain the top-selling vehicle model in the U.S. That’s all well and good, and Ford itself is quick to proudly note that about one out of every 50 of these vehicles sold for 2023 has been the new all electric F-150 Lightning.

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While there is a healthy and necessary market for pickup trucks out there, it’s difficult to imagine a reasonable argument in favor of profiting off the proliferation of aftermarket coal-rolling equipment. Whatever the resolution of the new case against eBay, at the very least it will serve as a stern warning to any other companies that may be tempted to make a few bucks by helping their customers blacken the skies.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].

Topics

Clean Air Act, DOJ, eBay, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Government, Pickup Trucks