New tailpipe emission rules from the EPA aim to boost EV sales
The Biden Administration is going to make history: New rules for the auto industry to curb emissions of carbon monoxide and its impact on the transportation system
The union of concerned scientists says the EPA’s proposalbuilds on past policies to clarify what is expected of auto makers as the us tries to curtail carbon emissions “We’ve given them the carrot,” he says. Here is the stick.
The proposals could become one of the Biden administration’s most significant moves towards reducing air pollution and decarbonizing the US transportation system, which is alone responsible for more than a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“We’re going to envision and innovate and achieve this future together,” he said during a call with reporters. It’s within our grasp. There is no mistake about it.
Margo Oge, a former EPA official and the chair of the board of the International Council on Clean Transportation, called the regulations “the single most important regulatory initiative by the Biden administration … to really reduce the worst impacts of climate change.”
“The administration is going to make history — if indeed, at the end of the day, they finalize these ambitious standards,” she said in a press conference arranged by the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.
Before they are finalized, the proposed standards (which include several alternative options) will be open for public comment. They may be revised before they go into effect. Medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks are proposed for new standards by the EPA.
New ideas for the fuel economy standards set by the federal government are expected soon. These are also separate from — and designed differently than — the zero-emission vehicle mandates adopted in California and some other states.
It sets a standard for emissions based on the size and type of vehicle being built. According to the agency, companies will need to produce 25% of their vehicles to meet the new rules.
Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on new battery plants and production lines by the auto industry in a move to electric vehicles.
Many companies had differing timelines for when they were going electric, and many didn’t publicly say they were going to be in a position to use two-thirds electric in the US by 2032.
The switch to EVs could have benefits for broader society, too: fewer premature deaths from road pollution and reduced impacts of climate change. The US is the world’s largest consumer of oil and transportation is its largest source of planet-warming emissions.
The Biden administration gave many advantages to the auto industry in order to persuade them to go electric.
The bipartisan infrastructure deal that poured $7.5 billion into building an EV charging network so that drivers powered by plug don’t have to worry about running out of power was signed two years ago. New incentives were created last summer by the inflation reduction act to encourage businesses to bring battery and electric cars to the US, and the tax credits were given to companies that manufacture batteries.
The proposed regulations are going to be open for discussion, and car makers will be very vocal about what they believe can be achieved over the next decade.
In legal filings, they wrote that their members would suffer “material adverse consequences” from a shift toward electric vehicles, which would also hurt the coffers of oil-producing states like Texas.
Notably, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the trade group for major automakers, has defended the EPA’s right to set those standards, saying nobody questions the future is electric.
“A lot has to go right for this massive — and unprecedented — change in our automotive market and industrial base to succeed,” John Bozzella, CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents several major automakers, told Reuters. Bozzella cites EV charging infrastructure, electrical grid resiliency, and supply chain constraints as some of the challenges ahead.
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The administration needs to hurry to finalize the rules in order to make it harder for a future Congress or president to reverse them. The new standards are predicted to go into effect early in the future.
Over the past few administrations, the political jockeying around emissions rules has been intense. After he was elected in 2016, Donald Trump rolled back emissions standards put in place by Barack Obama, making it easier for automakers to produce polluting cars. Biden reversed the decline after he came into office.
The administration has done some things, but some environmental groups want it to go further. The Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport Campaign says that Biden’s chance was to take the biggest single step of any nation to confront the climate crisis, but the EPA’s proposal stalls out when it comes to new gas-guzzlers.
Becker notes that the draft rules fail to account for the millions of gas-powered vehicles on the road today and that they fall well short of the 75% pollution cut necessary to protect our planet.
Americans could stand to save up to $1.1 trillion on gasoline prices should the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to impose the toughest-ever auto emissions standards be adopted, the agency projected on Wednesday.
The projection was included in a report issued by the EPA that shows how strict the regulations will be in order to encourage the use of electric vehicles.
The EPA predicts that U.S. consumption and net imports of petroleum would both go down as a result. That would increase U.S. energy security, although as the EPA acknowledges, the U.S. is now also a major oil producer — in fact, the world’s largest oil producer.
The pattern is similar in the EPA analysis. If the proposed standards are put in place, the EPA estimates every car sold in in 2032 will cost $1,200 more to manufacture than it would otherwise.
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“This reinvents the vehicle,” says Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Cox Automotive. “It reinvents how consumers interact with their vehicle. It changes the entire industrial base.
Thomas Boylan, the regulatory director at the Zero Emissions Transportation Association — a trade group representing companies along the EV supply chain, which stands to benefit from this transition — noted that the industry has a few years to prepare.
“The investments that are being made today, of which there are very many, … they are going to bear fruit over the time period that these standards contemplate,” he says. There is going to be a very different world come 2027 according to me.
The new rules make it difficult for EV builders to qualify for tax credits in the near future. But they have spurred new mining, battery building, and manufacturing projects in the US, the seedlings, the White House hopes, of a global car industry driven by the US and not China.
The infrastructure bill that Congress enacted in 2021, along with a massive spending bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed in 2022, will allow federal money to be funneled intocharging infrastructure and tax credits for consumers and for the manufacturing of automobiles or batteries.
Lithium and cobalt are needed to manufacture modern batteries, and the Biden administration is encouraging companies to purchase these and other materials through countries that have free trade agreements with the US. The administration is also encouraging domestic manufacturing in order to secure supply chains and dial back dependence on China. Only if key minerals come from countries that are free-trade partners such as the United States and Australia are some tax credits available. But so far, there are no obvious showstoppers when it comes to supplies of crucial minerals for electric-car batteries, according to the energy consultancy BloombergNEF.
“The investments are there, and these nations can theoretically provide sufficient supplies,” says Evelina Stoikou, an energy-storage analyst at BloombergNEF in New York City. She says that it would be important for the United States to strengthen international partnerships as demand from Europe and other regions will rise.
