As part of a crackdown on the nation’s largest source of emissions that contribute to climate change, the White House in April proposed rules to make cars and light trucks more efficient and push more consumers to drive electric vehicles.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the standards would cut 7.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide through 2055, the equivalent of eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions from the entire current U.S. transportation sector for four years. The rules set tailpipe emission limits for passenger vehicles between model years 2027 and 2032 and, due to their stringency, will effectively require that roughly two-thirds of cars sold in the U.S. be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2032.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the standards deliver on President Joe Biden’s “promise to protect people and the planet, securing critical reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution and ensuring significant economic benefits like lower fuel and maintenance costs for families.” In a statement announcing the rules, Regan added that the standards “are readily achievable thanks to President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, which is already driving historic progress to build more American-made electric cars and secure America’s global competitiveness.”
With the tailpipe rules also coming alongside the administration’s investments in clean energy and planned announcement of new emission standards for power plants, environmentalists applauded the Biden White House for taking strong action to fight climate change.
“It’s a pretty big deal,” Thomas Boylan, regulatory director for the electric vehicle trade group Zero Emission Transportation Association and a former EPA official, told CNN. “This is really going to set the tone for the rest of the decade and into the 2030s in terms of what this administration is looking for the auto industry to do when it comes to decarbonizing and ultimately electrifying.”
Some automakers, however, expressed concern about how quickly the standards would require them to produce and sell more electric cars. Widespread deployment of electric vehicles also requires the rapid construction of charging infrastructure and a shift in consumer mindsets.
About 7% of vehicles currently sold in the U.S. are electric. The jump to 67% by 2032 would be a nearly tenfold increase.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the lobbying group representing automakers, said that’s still a heavy lift and would require more manufacturing incentives and tax credits.
Congress passed tax credits totaling up to $7,500 for new EVs as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act but has limited the number of models eligible for the full credit based on factors like domestic manufacturing standards. “America’s electric transformation is underway. The vehicles are in production, and automakers are committed to the shift,” said the group’s CEO, John Bozzella, in a statement.
“The question isn’t whether it can be done. It’s how fast it can be done.” An April poll from the Associated Press found that only a minority, about 19%, of Americans said they are “very” or “extremely” likely to buy an EV the next time they make a vehicle purchase, while 47% of those polled were opposed to purchasing an EV, pointing to high prices and a lack of charging stations.
Meanwhile some lawmakers in opposition to the proposed EPA rules argued that they could weaken U.S. energy security given the reliance on other countries to supply the materials needed to produce EVs.
“The EPA is lying to Americans with false claims about how their manipulation of the market to boost EVs will help American energy security,” said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in a statement. “In reality, this is a Trojan horse. To meet these timelines will mean strengthening our reliance on minerals and technologies controlled by the Chinese.”
Manchin said he would join Republicans in using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn the EPA rules. “I don’t believe that making progress on climate change should come at the expense of our national and energy security,” he said. The CRA is a tool that can be used to overturn actions and rules proposed by federal agencies.
It requires a simple majority vote in order to be adopted, but it can only be introduced once a final rule has been submitted to Congress. The EPA rules in question are still open for comment and are not expected to be finalized until later in 2023.
For more background, see the May 2022 issue of Congressional Digest on the “Green New Deal.”
