Old cars are much dirtier than new ones: According to a study by Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, cars over 10 years old account for 70 to 80 percent of emissions of smog, carbon monoxide and other local pollutants that pose a pollution threat. human health, despite representing a much smaller percentage of the automotive fleet. When an old car subject to weaker tailpipe standards is retired and someone buys a new car, it’s not only good for the economy, it helps clean the air.
But when those new cars are more expensive, Americans slow down their purchases. According to Kelley Blue Book, the average price of a new electric vehicle is still more than $15,000 more than the average combustion engine car, so at least in the short term, the new EPA rule environment will substantially increase the prices of new cars. slowing the “fleet transformation” and making the air around us dirtier and less safe.
Biden’s EPA says electric vehicle prices will drop rapidly in the coming years, but experience doesn’t always bear that out: for example, Ford announced last summer that it was raising prices for its F-150 Lightning series between $6,000 and $8,500, an increase of $6,000. approximately 15 percent per vehicle. The Biden administration proposes to address the higher cost of electric vehicles by offering subsidies to consumers, such as the tax credit of up to $7,500 per vehicle contained in the Inflation Reduction Act. (The credit is subject to price caps for cars and income caps for buyers.) The law’s entire basket of climate subsidies costs taxpayers $370 billion over 10 years, but even this amount is not enough to cover the higher sticker prices of electric vehicles. The new rule will effectively try to shove electric vehicles down the public’s throat at a faster rate than it has shown a willingness to swallow.
The proposed rule also assumes that Detroit can make these vehicles on this scale, and that the United States would be stronger if it could. However, neither is true: we do not have enough domestic production, or even reliable sources, of the minerals needed to produce the necessary quantities of electric vehicles, batteries, or renewable energy that will be needed to charge all new electric vehicles.
As S&P Global Vice President Daniel Yergin recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, meeting Biden’s climate goals will require large amounts of copper (of which 40 percent is mined in Peru and Chile, and 47 percent is found in China). lithium (of which 60% is processed in China) and cobalt (of which 70% is produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo). By giving unreliable sources and competitors significant influence over the US auto industry, this rule will make America less safe.
Finally, the rule rests on dubious legal authority. The Clean Air Act does not specifically regulate carbon dioxide, nor does it give the EPA the authority to require automakers to sell a specific number of electric vehicles. And the Biden administration didn’t have the votes to pass such a broad EV mandate in Congress, even when Democrats controlled both chambers. But by setting such strict fleet-wide carbon dioxide emissions requirements in such a tight time frame, the EPA is forcing automakers to dramatically increase electric vehicle production as the only way to meet it
This forced rebuilding of the US auto industry may not hold up in court, just as the attempted rebuilding of the US electric industry by the Obama and Biden teams did not. To quote the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on this issue (West Virginia v. United States. EPA), this may be a case of the EPA trying to “adopt a regulatory program that Congress had notoriously refused to enact.”
The administration will argue that the rule only sets an ambitious standard for fleet-wide fuel efficiency in a given year. But the EPA’s own projections estimated that 67 percent of new light-duty vehicles sold in 2032, nine years away, would be electric under the proposed rule. By comparison, electric vehicles accounted for just 5.8 percent of new car sales in the United States last year.
One lesson of the Clean Air Act of 1990, whose benefits far exceeded its costs, is that it largely allowed the market, aided by technological innovation, to come up with the most efficient ways to reduce emissions as required by law. This new rule would abandon that measured approach, put the economy and national security at risk, and pile new costs on the American consumer.
