Long, long ago -- say, 2020 -- He Who Shall Not Be Named (Lest We Barf) cut back the standard for improving car emissions to a mere 1.5% per year. Yesterday, President Biden set far more optimistic goals: An improvement of 10% for this year, followed by 5% in subsequent years, and a goal for half of new passenger vehicle sales be powered by electricity by 2030. Right now, only 2% of U.S. car sales are electric vehicles.
“[The future is] all electric. There’s no turning back. It’s a question whether we will lead or fall behind,” Biden said at the White House on Thursday. “To unlock our full potential, we need to keep investing in our workers and our manufacturing capacity.”
Even more remarkably, honchos from the United Auto Workers' Union and Ford, GM, and Stellantis (aka Fiat Chrysler) were in the audience when Biden made his announcement.
Turns out that building electric vehicles is a goal for car makers too. Investors have been yammering "electric" for a while now, particularly since the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. GM has already set a goal of making all its cars electric by 2035, while Stellantis "expects" to have 40 percent of US sales be "low emission" by 2030. Ford's CEO, Jim Farley, said in a statement that Ford is “well positioned to have fully electric vehicles account for 40 to 50% of our U.S. sales by 2030.” That's a change from 40 percent of its worldwide car sales by 2030.
However you slice it, that's a lot of agreement from carmakers. There are no cheers erupting from oil and gas producers, but even they have learned to talk softly. Ron Chittim, a VP at the American Petroleum Institute, said, “While API and our member companies support transportation initiatives that both reduce emissions and ensure affordable vehicle choices for Americans, the best way to accelerate U.S. climate progress is through an economy-wide carbon price policy rather than costly market mandates.” If you doze off during the first half of that sentence, you might not notice the conclusion.
Of course, carmakers are expecting a boost or two from the government. There's already a tax break of up to $7,500 for electric cars, but carmakers are also expecting the U.S. to build power stations across the country. Biden's original ask in the infrastructure bill was $174 billion for half a million charge stations, but that sum shrank to 7.5 billion during the bill's negotiations.
No matter. The industry is charging already.
__________
Is Biden's step too little too late, or too much too fast?
Does this announcement make you sigh in relief? Or does it make you want to rush out and buy your favorite gas-powered car in case it goes out of production?
Does it surprise you to see two major carmakers that are planning to meet similar goals already?
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/566601-biden-administration-rolls-out-clean-car-goals?rl=1
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