Another push for electric vehicles

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: climate policy and perhaps your next new car.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency released new tailpipe emissions rules—aimed at cutting emissions in half in American cars by 2032.

How so? Basically, by cutting out the tailpipe. Under the new rules electric vehicle sales would make up half of all new cars sold, meaning as a share of market. They’d have to jump sevenfold in eight years.

REICHARD: The Biden administration touts the new rules as a win for climate policy… but what are the trade-offs?

WORLD’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY: Linda Henderson owns a fuel station and convenience store in Louisiana. Last year, some people were trying to convince her to install an electric vehicle charging station.

LINDA HENDERSON: It's really expensive to do that… So I just decided that I really wasn't sure, since—we live in a rural area, that it might be better if we decided for ourselves whether we thought EV, electric vehicles, were what they said.

When she says rural, she means 100-miles-from-a-city rural. So Henderson and her husband bought a Tesla Model X.

They soon realized that its 350-mile range was only for optimal conditions, meaning they often came home with a low battery. Henderson says she loves the Tesla as a car. But…

HENDERSON: It's just that being all electric has has drawbacks for us. I think if we lived in a urban area, it would be a lot more practical for us.

Henderson decided to wait on putting in the charger.

But the Biden administration is trying to push up the timeline of Americans going electric by issuing new emissions standards.

To meet the standards, just over half of all cars sold in the U.S. would have to be electric within eight years. And about 10 percent would have to be plug-in-hybrids.

The new timeline is slower than the Administration proposed last year, but still meets similar goals. The old timeline faced pushback from auto workers, manufacturers, and car salesmen who said they couldn’t get EVs off their lots.

MARLO LEWIS: Ford has lost $4.7 billion on its electric vehicle program… just in 2023.

Marlo Lewis is a fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

LEWIS: It translates into something like $64,000 a vehicle that Ford has been losing on each EV it sells in the last year.

The EPA says any extra costs to manufacturers and consumers will be offset by billions in savings from limiting natural disasters due to climate change and health problems due to poor air quality, among other things.

But there’s a problem.

LEWIS: The EPA refuses to calculate what the actual mitigation of climate change these these standards will accomplish. In other words, how much warming will this avert? How much sea level rise will this avoid? They don't say. They declined to say.

The EPA estimates its rules would avoid 700 tons of carbon emissions. However, the numbers the EPA provides don’t take into account things like more strain on the power grid or more mining for the minerals needed for batteries.

LEWIS: We're dealing with changes in the world that are, for all practical purposes, infinitesimal. These are phony benefit benefits. An effect that cannot be experienced by human beings or other living things is a benefit in name only.

So, are auto manufacturers likely to go along with this?

Well, if they don’t comply, they could be hit with extra costs and fines. And under current law, they can’t challenge it directly. But with recent Supreme Court precedent from the 2022 case West Virginia v. EPA, that could be open to litigation.

LEWIS: Congress has not clearly authorized the EPA to say we think it's better that there be no internal combustion engine vehicles, and therefore we are going to phase them out.

It’s also possible that if Donald Trump is re-elected, he would reverse the EPA’s emissions policy like he did with Obama-era rules. However, Lewis says that any rollbacks could take a while, and Trump would likely be sued by climate activists and auto manufacturers who have invested heavily in EV manufacturing.

Whether automakers can meet EPA standards and get a return on their investment will be determined by consumers like Linda Henderson.

HENDERSON: Pure electric to me is not as practical as it is made out to be. Yeah, I was, I was really impressed by all the commercials on television, you know. They make it look like it's so much fun and so glamorous, but it's not really, it's not really quite that way.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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