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BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ANNOUNCES RULE AIMED AT EXPANDING ELECTRIC
VEHICLES  
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Coral Davenport
March 20, 2024
New York Times
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_ The regulation would require automakers to sell more electric
vehicles and hybrids by gradually tightening limits on tailpipe
pollution. _

E.P.A. Administrator Michael S. Regan unveiled the new rules in
Washington on Wednesday.Credit..., Pete Kiehart for The New York Times


 

The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most
significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule
designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light
trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.

Nearly three years in the making, the new tailpipe pollution limits
from the Environmental Protection Agency would transform the American
automobile market. A record 1.2 million electric vehicles rolled off
dealers’ lots last year, but they made up just 7.6 percent of total
U.S. car sales, far from the 56 percent target under the new
regulation. An additional 16 percent of new cars sold would be
hybrids.

Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest
single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States,
pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023
the hottest year in recorded history
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Electric vehicles are central to President Biden’s strategy to
confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation’s
emissions in half by the end of this decade.
[[link removed]] But
E.V.s have also become politicized and are a flashpoint in the 2024
presidential campaign.

“Three years ago, I set an ambitious target
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that half of all new cars and trucks sold in 2030 would be
zero-emission,” said Mr. Biden in a statement. “Together, we’ve
made historic progress. Hundreds of new expanded factories across the
country. Hundreds of billions in private investment and thousands of
good-paying union jobs. And we’ll meet my goal for 2030 and race
forward in the years ahead.”

The rule increasingly limits the amount of pollution allowed from
tailpipes over time so that, by 2032, more than half the new cars sold
in the United States would most likely be zero-emissions vehicles in
order for carmakers to meet the standards.

That would avoid more than seven billion tons of carbon dioxide
emissions over the next 30 years, according to the E.P.A. That’s the
equivalent of removing a year’s worth of all the greenhouse gases
generated by the United States, the country that has historically
pumped the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The regulation
would provide nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits to society,
according to the agency, including $13 billion of annual public health
benefits thanks to improved air quality.

The standards would also save the average American driver about $6,000
in reduced fuel and maintenance over the life of a vehicle, the E.P.A.
estimated.

The transition to electric vehicles would require enormous changes in
manufacturing, infrastructure, technology, labor, global trade and
consumer habits.

[A shiny black car with its hood open is sitting on a hoist in a
manufacturing plant.]

A BMW plant near Spartanburg, S.C. New rules are designed to make a
majority of new vehicles sold in the United States all-electric or
hybrids by 2032. Credit...Sean Rayford/Associated Press

And it has become politically fraught. Former President Donald J.
Trump, who is campaigning to retake the White House from Mr. Biden in
November, has sought to weaponize electric vehicles, repeating false
claims
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campaign rallies about their performance and affordability and
using increasingly heated rhetoric
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Most recently, he warned of a “blood bath” in the middle of a
remarks about electric vehicles.

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying
organization, has started what it says is a “seven figure
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campaign of advertising, phone calls and text messages against what it
falsely calls “Biden’s E.P.A. car ban” in the swing states
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, as well as in
Ohio, Montana and the Washington, D.C., market.

The E.P.A. regulation is not a ban. It does not mandate the sales of
electric vehicles, and gas-powered cars and trucks could still be
sold. Rather, it requires carmakers to meet tough new average
emissions limits across their entire product line. It’s up to the
manufacturers to decide how to comply.

Under the Clean Air Act, the agency can limit the pollution generated
by the total number of cars sold each year. E.P.A. officials said
automakers could comply with the emissions caps by selling a mix of
conventional gasoline-burning cars, hybrids, electric vehicles or
other types of vehicles, such as cars powered by hydrogen. The new
regulation, which would not apply to sales of used automobiles or
light trucks, would take effect starting with model year 2027.

Car companies that exceed the new restrictions could face substantial
penalties.

[Cars and trucks, their headlights on, traveling several ribbons of
highways as the sun sets in Los Angeles. ]

The regulations would tighten limits on tailpipe
pollution.Credit...Mette Lampcov for The New York Times

John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation,
which represents 42 car companies that produce nearly all the new
vehicles sold in the United States, said in a statement that the new
rule was “a stretch goal” but one that offered some flexibility.
“The future is electric,” he said. Still, the rules “are mindful
of the importance of choice to drivers and preserve their ability to
choose the vehicle that’s right for them,” he said.

But the rule is expected to face an immediate legal challenge by a
coalition of fossil fuel companies and Republican attorneys general,
complaints that are likely to wind their way to the Supreme Court.

“They may wish for us all to drive E.V.s or no cars at all, but at
the end of the day that’s not their decision,” said Elizabeth
Murrill, the attorney general of Louisiana, a major oil and gas
producing state that has been involved in a series of lawsuits
challenging the Biden E.P.A. “There is a limit to their authority to
remake society in their own vision and the court has realized that.”

 

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The auto emissions rule is the most impactful of four major climate
regulations from the Biden administration, including restrictions on
emissions from power plants
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trucks and methane leaks from oil and gas wells
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The rule comes on top of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act
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the biggest climate law in the nation’s history, which is providing
at least $370 billion in federal incentives to support clean energy,
including tax credits to buyers of electric vehicles.

The policies are intended to help the country meet Mr. Biden’s
target of cutting U.S. greenhouse emissions in half by 2030 and
eliminating them by 2050. Climate scientists say all major economies
must do the same if the world is to avert the most deadly and costly
effects of climate change.

“These standards form what we see as a historic climate grand slam
for the Biden administration,” said Manish Bapna, president of the
Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, a political action
committee that aims to advance environmental causes.

Mr. Bapna’s group has calculated that the four regulations, combined
with the Inflation Reduction Act, would reduce the nation’s
greenhouse emissions 42 percent by 2030, getting the country most of
the way to Mr. Biden’s 2030 target.

Mr. Trump has promised to delete those climate programs should he
return to the White House.

The Biden administration is racing to finalize climate regulations to
protect them from one looming threat in a polarized political climate:
According to statute, as long as the rule is published more than 60
legislative days before the end of the presidential term, it cannot be
eliminated by a simple majority vote in Congress.

[President Biden,one hand in pants pocket, walks by and points to a
shiny bright yellow Mustang parked on a blue carpet at the Detroit car
show.]

President Biden visited an electric Ford Mustang at the Detroit Auto
Show in 2022. Electric vehicles are central to his administration’s
strategy to confront global warming.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York
Times

In writing the final tailpipe regulation, the administration relaxed
some elements in a concession
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car manufacturers and their biggest union, the United Auto Workers.

Even though major auto companies have been investing substantially in
building and marketing all-electric vehicles, they have complained
that the pace of change required under the rule as originally proposed
a year ago was too rapid.

Unionized auto workers, who fear a rapid transition to electric
vehicles because they have fewer parts that require fewer workers to
produce, and because many new E.V. plants are being built in states
that don’t support union labor, told the White House the same thing.

In a statement on Wednesday, the United Auto Workers said the E.P.A.
had “come a long way to create a more feasible emissions rule”
that would protect workers who build gas-powered cars while creating a
path for car makers to “implement the full range of automotive
technologies to reduce emissions.”

Mr. Biden needs both cooperation from the auto industry and political
support from the unionized auto workers who backed him in 2020. The
auto industry employs thousands of voters in Michigan, a swing state
that could determine who will win the White House in November.

In response, the final E.P.A. rule relaxed the pace at which
automakers must comply with the rule in its early years, ramping it up
sharply only after 2030.

That lowers the number of E. V.s that automakers must sell before
2030, and it also means that emissions will go down more slowly.
Climate scientists have warned that emissions must drop sharply and
quickly in order to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of climate
change.

“E.P.A. caved to pressure from Big Auto, Big Oil and car dealers and
riddled the plan with loopholes big enough to drive a Ford F150
through,” said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological
Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign. Gas-powered cars would
“dominate sales through much of this decade, guzzling and polluting
into the middle of the century,” he said.

E.P.A. officials said the final rule would still cut the same amount
of emissions over 30 years.

[A blue Tesla is connected by a black cord to one in a long row of
chargers at an EV charging station. ]

An electric vehicle charging station in Barstow, Calif. Analysts
project that the United States will need more than two million public
chargers by 2030.Credit...Lauren Justice for The New York Times

Asked about that trade-off in a telephone call with reporters, Michael
S. Regan, the administrator of the E.P.A., said the changes were
designed to lead to a “stronger, more durable” policy, in other
words, one less likely to be rolled back by a future administration or
the courts. “We’re not sacrificing the environmental gains we want
to see,” he said.

Even if the new E.P.A. limits survive legal challenges, a transition
away from the internal combustion engine depends on a number of other
factors.

A lack of public charging stations for electric vehicles remains a
problem. While more than 172,000 were installed last year, analysts
project
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the nation will need more than two million chargers by 2030 to support
the growth in electric vehicles envisioned by the E.P.A. regulation.

At the same time, growth in sales of electric vehicles is slowing
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even as the new regulations would require a nearly tenfold increase in
such sales within just eight years. Buyers of new electric vehicles
are eligible for up to $7,500 in federal tax credits, but only 18
models are currently eligible for that full credit, down from about
two dozen last year. One of those eligible models, the Ford F-150
Lightning
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an all-electric pickup truck that once had a waiting list of 200,000,
last year saw sales of 24,000, far short of the 150,000 sales
projected by Ford.

“At the end of the day, this is going to be up to consumers,” said
Stephanie Brinley, an analyst for the Auto Intelligence service at S&P
Global Mobility. “They’re being asked to change their patterns of
what they drive, what they buy, how they interact with their vehicles.
And you can’t push them faster than they are going to go.”

_Coral Davenport [[link removed]] covers
energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The
Times.She has been covering the federal government’s efforts to
fight climate change by regulating auto pollution since 2009._

 

* Electric vehicles
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* EPA Regulations
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* Biden Administration
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