Biden, in a Push to Phase Out Gas Cars, Tightens Pollution Rules

WASHINGTON – President Biden on Thursday announced a multi-tier strategy aimed at quickly converting Americans from gasoline-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles – a key part of his plan to reduce the pollution that is warming the planet.

Mr Biden is initially restoring auto-mileage standards and slightly bolstering them to the levels that existed under President Barack Obama but weakened during the Trump administration. The new regulations, which will apply to vehicles from model year 2023 onwards, would reduce about a third of the carbon dioxide produced annually by the United States and prevent about 200 billion gallons of gasoline from being burned over the life of the cars, according to a White House factsheet.

Next, the government plans to develop even stricter environmental regulations for cars and heavy trucks that will force automakers to boost sales of electric vehicles.

“There’s a vision of the future that begins now, a future of the automotive industry that is electric – battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, fuel-cell,” said Biden, who announced the plan from the south of the White House in front of a row of parked lawns Electric vehicles, including the Ford F150 Lightning, the Chevrolet Bolt EV, and a Jeep Wrangler. “The question is whether we will lead or fall behind in the future.”

Mr Biden’s actions amount to an attempt to overtake a large American industry to better compete with China, which makes about 70 percent of the world’s electric vehicle batteries. In an effort to combine environmental, economic and foreign policy, Biden wants to convert and expand the domestic supply chain so that the batteries that are indispensable for electric vehicles are also manufactured in American factories.

“This is the first example of how Biden’s government would conduct industrial policy in the context of climate change,” said Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

Without a radical change in the types of vehicles Americans drive, it will be impossible for Mr Biden to deliver on his ambitious promise to increase emissions that are warming the planet by 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade reduce. Gasoline-powered cars and trucks are the largest single source of greenhouse gases produced in the United States, accounting for 28 percent of the country’s total CO2 emissions.

He also signed an executive order calling on the government to ensure that half of all vehicles sold in the United States are electric by 2030.

As a sign of support from the industry, the president on the South Lawn was joined by the CEOs of the country’s three largest automakers and the head of the United Auto Workers. Automakers pledged that 40 to 50 percent of their new car sales will be electric vehicles by 2030, up from just 2 percent this year, on condition that Congress passes a bill that spends billions of dollars on a national electric vehicle charging network Petrol stations and tax breaks to make it cheaper for companies to build cars and buy them for consumers.

A quick transition to electric cars and trucks faces several challenges.

Experts say it won’t be possible for electric vehicles to move from niche to mainstream without electric charging stations being as ubiquitous as corner gas stations. And while union leaders attended the White House event calling Mr. Biden a “brother”, they remain concerned about a wholesale switch to electric vehicles that require fewer workers to assemble.

Mr Biden outlined the mission in stark terms and called the transition an act “to save the planet”.

Given the effects of a warming planet seen in record droughts, deadly heat waves, floods, and forest fires around the world, scientists say simply restoring Obama-era climate controls will not be enough.

“Obama has started moving us in the right direction to deal with climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “Trump tore it all apart. Biden is now putting the parts back together. But we’re way back. The much harder work is yet to come. The major overhaul of the transportation system and power grid is a WWII-scale enterprise, and it’s just getting started. “

The switch to electric cars

The exhaust emissions regulations enacted by the Obama administration in 2012 required automobiles sold by automakers to average about 81 miles per gallon by 2025. Mr Trump relaxed the standard in 2020 to about 44 miles per gallon by 2026. The new Biden The standard would be 52 miles per gallon by 2026.

The White House estimates that the regulations would reduce two billion tons of carbon dioxide, about a third of the total annual carbon pollution in the United States, and prevent the burning of about 200 billion gallons of gasoline.

The Biden government is then planning a series of stricter emissions regulations for vehicles produced beyond 2026. It is these rules that Mr Biden hopes will essentially drive automakers to phase out the internal combustion engine. Since this second set of rules could be technically complex and legally ambitious, administrators decided to first quickly reintroduce the Obama rules to cut some emissions while federal workers challenge themselves to write the future rule.

“Depending on how they are written, this second rule will either or not get us on the road to widespread use of electric vehicles by the end of this decade,” said Jeff Alson, a former senior engineer and policy advisor to the EPA to the Obama auto emissions standards.

“It will be challenging because it is difficult for regulators to force a major technology shift,” said Alson. “That’s pretty rare. If you want to replace an internal combustion engine with a battery and replace the transmission with electric motors – that replaces the guts of gasoline-powered cars. Forcing such changes will not be easy for federal agencies and politicians unless they have the support of the public and automakers. “

Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the auto company created this year after the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, announced in a joint statement their “common goal” of selling 40 to 50 percent electric vehicles by 2030.

But they need government support and a “full set of electrification guidelines” to turn their aspirations into action, they wrote.

Specifically, the automakers want the Congress to create incentives for car buyers and pay for a charging network, investments in research and development, and incentives to expand electric vehicle production and supply chains.

Mr Biden has asked Congress for $ 174 billion to create 500,000 charging points. A pending infrastructure bill in the Senate is only $ 7.5 billion. However, it is also allocating $ 73 billion to expand and modernize the power grid, an essential step in bringing power to new car charging stations. A second bill that could go through Congress this fall could include far more spending on electric vehicles, consumer tax incentives, and research. None of the proposals are guaranteed to happen in the narrowly divided Congress.

The International Council on Clean Transportation, a research organization, concluded that the country would need 2.4 million charging points for electric vehicles by 2030 – up from 216,000 in 2020 – if about 36 percent of new vehicle sales were electric.

Some environmental groups expressed skepticism that the car companies would keep their promises.

“Voluntary pledges from auto companies make a New Year’s weight loss resolution look like a legally binding contract,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Global warming is burning forests, roasting the West and making storms worse. Now is not the time to propose weak standards and then promise strong ones later. “

Some automakers are already gearing up for an all-electric future, in part due to policy changes elsewhere. The European Union has announced that all new cars sold will be emission-free by 2035. In the United States, California and Massachusetts have made the same commitment, while Washington State has set an earlier deadline of 2030. General Motors has announced that it will only sell zero-emission vehicles through 2035.

The unions, meanwhile, have raised concerns about the transition to electric vehicles, which will require around a third fewer workers to assemble than gasoline-powered cars or trucks.

In a statement, Ray Curry, president of United Auto Workers said: “While the UAW notes that companies have made voluntary electric vehicle commitments, the UAW’s focus is not on hard deadlines or percentages, but on maintaining wages and benefits, they were the heart and soul of the American middle class. “

Mr Biden’s efforts to shape the auto industry by combining his climate agenda with his focus on competitiveness with China is just the latest example of the government’s focus on industrial policy. In June, the president pushed one of the Senate’s most ambitious industrial laws through, allocating $ 52 billion to the semiconductor industry and another $ 195 billion to research and development over the next decade.

Ultimately, however, the success of Mr Biden’s automobile plan will depend on whether Americans trust an entirely new type of car.

“In the world of electrification, there are the regulations the executive can do and the need for ancillary infrastructure that is left to a split congress,” said David G. Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California , San Diego. “And then you have to change human behavior, that is largely uncharted territory.”

David E. Sanger contributed to the coverage.

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