As a presidential candidate in 2020, Kamala Harris supported several radical proposals to phase out gasoline-powered cars by 2040. She also supported a mandate that required 50% of new car sales by 2030 to be EVs.
That was when Harris was running against other Democrats who vied with each other to see who was the most hysterical environmentalist and who could ban gas-powered cars the quickest.
This is 2024, and public attitudes toward EV mandates and phasing out gas cars have changed considerably. Seventy percent of Americans oppose phasing out gas cars at any time while demand for EVs has cooled to the point that auto manufacturers around the world are reinvesting in hybrids rather than 100% electric vehicles.
This is the backdrop to an apparent backtrack on Harris's support for EV mandates and phasing out gas cars.
"In a lengthy 'fact-check' email last week that covered several issues, a campaign spokesperson included a line saying that Harris 'does not support an electric vehicle mandate,'" report Alex Thompson and Ben Geman of Axios, "suggesting she changed her previous position, without elaborating."
Joe Biden has been backing away from his EV mandates as well. The president tried an end-around on the EV mandate by requiring drastic reductions in tailpipe emissions. Those reductions would force automakers to phase out gas cars and sell more EVs. But when the final regs came out this past March, the rules had been softened to lengthen the time period for automakers to meet the new standards and relax rules on the number of EVs that the companies would need to sell.
This suggests that Harris is not only backing away from a position that she had previously supported, but one that President Joe Biden's administration put forward in new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) earlier this year.\
Some suggest that Harris' reasoning is nakedly political. "Vice President Harris is lying about her supposed opposition to an EV mandate," Sen. Pete Ricketts (R–Neb.) said in a statement. "This sudden reversal just months before the election is a pathetic and transparent attempt to distance herself from the unpopular EV mandates already being pushed by the Biden-Harris EPA."
In fairness, Harris' reasoning probably is less ideological than political: Polling conducted by the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, an oil industry trade group, indicates that most Americans—including a majority of Republicans and independents and a plurality of Democrats—oppose bans on gas-powered cars. The poll further found that majorities in eight battleground states oppose the bans by healthy margins, including Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—most or all of which Harris must win to become president.
Can Harris be trusted to continue to back away from these EV mandates and the phase-out of gas cars? Of course not. The pressure the green lobby can bring to bear on President Harris would be immense. Besides, Harris's record of blatant and frequent flip-flopping speaks to her inconstancy and her reliance on political expediency rather than possessing strong moral and philosophical underpinnings to her beliefs.
The market is determining where EVs are going. And it's not to Biden and Harris's liking.
"Many of our hybrids in the U.S. are now more profitable than their non-hybrid equivalent," Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley said in May. "We should stop talking about it as transitional technology."
Harris's hair-on-fire approach to the climate change problem probably means that she will tell the market to go to hell and listen to the green wackos instead.
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