Joe Biden can’t go a single day without issuing some edict on behalf of his leftist supporters. The man who ran as a moderate Democrat will reportedly push for about half of all U.S. cars to be electric just nine years from now.
President Joe Biden will set a new national target on Thursday for the adoption of electric vehicles, calling for them to represent half of all new auto sales by 2030, according to senior administration officials.
The target is expected to be supported by companies such as General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler. Executives of the Detroit automakers are scheduled to attend an event Thursday at the White House and pledge EV sales of between 40% and 50% by 2030.
Of course they will. They’re all rent-seekers now and seek to curry favor with the government that will buy up a whopping proportion of the EVs they make.
Toyota may remain notably quiet about this. The world’s largest automaker has repeatedly warned that our power grids aren’t ready to power billions of EVs. Elon Musk has said the same, and he’s atop the world’s largest EV automaker, Tesla. Neither Toyota nor Tesla oppose EVs. Neither do I, for that matter. They just don’t think our grids are ready to power them without very significant investment and overhauls. Who is going to pay for that? Biden’s bloated infrastructure bill doesn’t address it.
The alleged moderate Biden isn’t done messing with your car.
The Biden administration also is expected to announce proposed federal fuel economy and emission standards through the 2026 model-year that build on California’s tougher regulations, the officials said. The proposed standards are subject to a public comment period and final approval.
California’s regulations are why gas in that state costs so much more than it costs in every other state. As of today, gas is $4.38 a gallon in California, versus $2.84 in Texas, $3.02 in Florida, and $3.22 in New York, according to AAA. California’s regulations and taxes cause this imbalance. Biden wants to make everyone pay California gas prices. Why?
Biden’s proposed national standard would reach directly into your pocketbook and cause even more inflation than his unrestrained spending spree and his crackdown on U.S. energy producers are already causing.
Joe Biden ought to study topics before issuing edicts about them to please the activist left, which also favored defunding police despite the obvious outcome — it would get people killed. Business Insider recently reported that about 20% of EV owners end up switching back to gas cars. The hassle of charging the batteries is the leading reason they go back to gas.
Of those who switched, over 70% lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly fewer than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplace.
“If you don’t have a Level 2, it’s almost impossible,” said Tynan, who has tested a wide range of makes and models of PEVs over the years for his research.
Even with the faster charging, a Chevy Bolt he tested still needed nearly six hours to top its range back up to 300 miles from nearly empty — something that takes him just minutes at the pump with his family SUV.
In that same story, one EV owner noted that he could charge his car overnight at home and gain a whopping 36 miles of range because his house only has Level 1 capacity, the lowest an EV can take. Most homes have that level of power available, and that’s for one car. So the switch to EVs will require rewiring your home to accommodate your cars. Who will pay for that?
Then there’s the question of adding billions of cars to our electric grids, which almost no one talks about. This will demand not more unreliable and expensive wind and solar, but a lot of reliable nuclear power, and if we’re being honest, more natural gas. Almost no one discusses this. EVs run on power of some kind, which is generated not by burning gasoline in the onboard engine, but by burning something else somewhere else. Almost no one discusses this either.
Then after that, there’s the question of whether EVs are actually cleaner to make than gas-powered cars. EVs require toxic heavy metals and chemicals and elements such as lithium, which are mostly produced in Chile and China, not the United States. We have abundant, cheap, and clean-burning natural gas, which is what the activist left wants us to stop developing and using in favor of lithium, which, as noted, we don’t have a lot of, and the production of which is mostly done away from the EPA’s prying eyes in countries with much lower environmental standards than ours. You are, essentially, burning a lot of coal in China and using up a lot of water in Chile to make EVs for America and Europe at this point. The EV batteries remain toxic after they’re used up. Producing EVs is about as dirty if not dirtier than producing gas cars, but with the added bonus of benefiting China at America’s energy expense.
Great plan, Joe.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member