The executive order comes in a suite of new goals and mandates to cut climate-warming emissions from the auto sector
By
Dino Grandoni and Brady Dennis
President Biden on Thursday is set to unveil a far-reaching, multipronged plan to make U.S. cars and light trucks more fuel-efficient and to begin a shift to electric vehicles over the coming decade. The move marks one of the administration’s most consequential pushes so far to combat climate change and tackle the nation’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The suite of new goals and mandates, forged after months of talks with car manufacturers, autoworkers and environmental groups, is meant to transform the kind of vehicles Americans drive and to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. The move comes with political risks for Biden, who has faced pressure from activists and industry representatives alike, but represents a key part of his promise to try to slow rising global temperatures and propel the country toward a future in which the vehicles on roads and highways rely on little or no gasoline.
But it remains to be seen whether Biden’s call to action will be enough to get the auto industry to shift gears to cleaner cars quickly enough as part of a broader effort to worsen global warming.
“The future of the auto industry is electric — and made in America,” Biden wrote on Twitter Thursday to announce the move.
The president is set to sign an executive order calling for half of new car sales to be of electric vehicles powered by batteries and fuel cells or plug-in electric hybrids by the end of the decade. Leaders from auto companies and labor unions are expected to join Biden at the White House on Thursday afternoon, according to the senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss plans publicly.
In the near term, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department were also set Thursday to propose new requirements on greenhouse gas emissions and fuel efficiency for cars, SUVs and pickup trucks through model year 2026.
That rulemaking represents the Biden administration’s first major effort to use the federal government’s regulatory authority to cut carbon emissions. It also is a repudiation of a freeze on fuel-efficiency standards imposed under Donald Trump, one of the former president’s biggest environmental rollbacks. Trump scaled back the requirements put in place under the Obama administration in 2012, which would have ramped up average fuel economy to 54.5 miles per gallon by model year 2025.
The Biden administration expects its actions to conserve about 200 billion gallons of gasoline and forestall around 2 billion metric tons of carbon pollution.
Looking further out, the Biden team is also kicking off its push to set longer-term pollution standards for everything from tiny sedans to huge semitrailers made in the second half of the decade.
Taken together, the administration’s effort to spur the sale of electric vehicles aims to slash emissions from the nation’s top driver of global warming — the transportation sector, in which more than 90 percent of the fuel used today is derived from petroleum.
Yet to get Americans into cleaner cars, the administration faces a bumpy road ahead.
“What we need to be doing is figuring out how to get really dramatic reductions [in emissions] going forward,” said Mary Nichols, the former chair of the California Air Resources Board who helped forge a deal with five major automakers in 2019 to tighten their mileage standards beyond what the Trump administration set. The Biden team modeled some of its near-term tailpipe targets on the California agreement.
But it is difficult to make up for lost ground in improving engines after the Trump administration eased regulations. Dave Cooke, senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that while he had not yet seen the administration’s final proposal, his group and others have been pressuring the White House to push beyond the parameters of the California deal.
“They are not really forcing the industry to do a full course correction after the Trump [rollback],” Cooke said. “It puts us far behind where we need to be.”
And it’s still unclear whether the Biden administration will do enough to put the country on the path to reach its goal under the Paris climate agreement. The president wants to cut U.S. emissions in half by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. With his executive order Thursday, Biden hopes to send a signal to other countries to set their own aggressive climate goals ahead of a major climate conference in Scotland in the fall.
In Detroit and other industrial cities, electric vehicles represent a challenge to autoworkers as factories shift from making internal combustion engines to battery-powered ones. A concern among factory workers is that their employers may be able to get by with fewer workers on the assembly line since electric vehicles have fewer parts. Both Ford and GM are investing in battery factories in the United States.
Brian Rothenberg, a spokesman for the United Auto Workers, which endorsed Biden last year, said the union’s focus “is not on hard deadlines or percentages, but on preserving the wages and benefits that have been the heart and soul of the American middle class.”
Meanwhile, the nation’s Big Three automakers — Ford, GM and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler — rallied around a “shared aspiration” less ambitious than the Biden goal. They are proposing that 40 to 50 percent of their annual U.S. sales be battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2030.
In a joint statement, the automakers said the shift “can be achieved only with the timely deployment of the full suite of electrification policies” from the federal government, including new financial incentives for drivers to buy zero-emission vehicles.
Reaction was mixed from environmental groups.
Simon Mui, deputy director for clean vehicles and fuels at the Natural Resources Defense Council, praised Biden’s proposal for getting the country “back on the road to cleaning up tailpipe pollution.” But he added: “This proposal delivers less carbon pollution reductions than the Obama-era standards and includes unfortunate loopholes that undercut progress.”
Without a quick transition, the United States risks sliding even further behind Europe and Asia in making batteries and other key components for electric vehicles. Biden’s action will undoubtedly face comparisons with what other developed nations are doing to speed the shift to electric vehicles.
“Whether U.S. manufacturers and workers see the benefits of this transition really depends on actions now,” said Zoe Lipman, director of manufacturing and advanced transportation at the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups.
The European Union last month proposed changes that would effectively phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered engines by 2035, part of a far-reaching package of measures intended to put the 27-country bloc on pace to reach net zero emissions throughout its economy by mid-century.
The U.S. government must play a role in hastening its own shift, Nichols said, because some automakers understandably are reluctant to move away from selling the highly profitable but gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks that remain popular today.
“They are not going to do it any faster than they have to,” said Nichols, who is now a visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Advocates for electric vehicles, in both government and industry, must also sway an American driving public worried about not being able to find spots to plug in and recharge.
A big question is how much financial support Congress will provide.
Plans to provide new tax breaks for buying electric vehicles hinge on Democrats passing a budget bill with razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate. And a bipartisan infrastructure plan includes just $7.5 billion for dotting U.S. corridors with vehicle chargers — half the amount Biden first called for to build 500,000 recharging spots.
“The auto companies are there. We need the consumers to be there,” said Don Stewart, vice president of public affairs at the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group that represents carmakers. “And the federal government plays a huge role in that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment