Featured Biden administration is said to slow early stage of shift to electric cars

Biden administration is said to slow early stage of shift to electric cars—The New York Times
The change to planned rules was an election-year concession to labor unions and auto executives, according to people familiar with the plan.

Hmm, if Trump wins, he will entirely scrap these regulations anyway.

Excerpt:

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In a concession to automakers and labor unions, the Biden administration intends to relax elements of one of its most ambitious strategies to combat climate change, limits on tailpipe emissions that are designed to get Americans to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, according to three people familiar with the plan.

Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time, with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030, these people said. They asked to remain anonymous because the regulation has not been finalized. The administration plans to publish the final rule by early spring.

The E.P.A. designed the proposed regulations so that 67 percent of sales of new cars and light-duty trucks would be all-electric by 2032, up from 7.6 percent in 2023, a radical remaking of the American automobile market.

That remains the goal. But as they finalize the regulations, administration officials are tweaking the plan to slow the pace at which auto manufacturers would need to comply, so that electric vehicle sales would increase more gradually through 2030 but then would have to sharply rise.

The change in pacing is in response to automakers who say that more time is needed to build a national network of charging stations and to bring down the cost of electric vehicles, and to labor unions that want more time to try to unionize new electric car plants that are opening around the country, particularly in the South.

An ambitious initial plan:

Postponing the sharp increase in electric vehicle sales until after 2030 would still eliminate roughly the same amount of auto emissions as the original proposal by 2055, according to E.P.A. models. But it would mean the nation would continue to pump auto emissions into the atmosphere in the short run. Scientists say every year counts in the government’s efforts to prevent the planet from tipping into more deadly and costly climate disasters.

“You’ll have faster warming if U.S. transportation emissions don’t decline before 2030,” said James Glynn, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

Scientists have warned that if average global temperatures increase by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, humans would struggle to adapt to increasingly violent storms, floods, fires, heat waves and other disruptions.

The planet has already warmed by about 1.2 degrees Celsius.

Ali Zaidi, Mr. Biden’s senior climate adviser, declined to discuss the details of the final regulation. But he said in an interview that Mr. Biden’s climate policies, combined with record federal investment in renewable energy, would still help to reach the president’s goal of cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

“I feel very good about how our policies, including the regulatory actions, are fitting together to boost our ability to hit our 2030 targets and setting us up for the longer term trajectory,” Mr. Zaidi said.

Still, experts say it’s uncertain whether Mr. Biden can meet his twin goals of cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050, a target that scientists say all nations must achieve to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
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@bwilson4web, this survey just came out. Biden ranked #14, and Trump ranked #45 (the last):

Official results of the 2024 presidential-greatness project expert survey | PDF file (right-click, then select “save link as,” and then “keep”)
Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston
Justin S. Vaughn, Coastal Carolina University