On Apr. 12, the Biden administration announced a new set of proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulings that would require by 2032 two-thirds (67%) of passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. to be "zero-tailpipe emission" types. In practice, that means electric cars. Lower fractions of service and transport trucks would also have to be electric by then. As reported in National Review, both automakers and consumer advocates criticized the move, saying that the industry is not ready for such a radical shift, and that the result will be higher prices for consumers and shortages of largely foreign-produced materials such as lithium and cobalt.
These proposed rules would be in addition to the Department of Transportation's so-called CAFE standards, a set of fuel-economy requirements that have had the unintended consequence of making U. S. automakers rely mainly on production of larger vehicles (e. g. pickups and SUVs), because of the perverse incentives put in place by the standards. Unintended consequences always follow mandates like this, and unless the EPA changes its collective mind, there are sure to be problems we can only dream of now caused by such an extreme requirement.
For one thing, we are already seeing stresses on the electric grid caused by the rather exotic requirements of rapid-charge stations for electric cars. The most powerful stations, the "direct-current fast charging" (DCFC) ones, can draw up to 350 kW and charge an all-electric (battery-only) passenger car in as little as 20 minutes. In doing so, however, it uses as much energy as an average household uses in three days. Multiply this high-peaking intermittent demand by several million, and you can understand why Californians have already had requests from their state leaders to restrict charging of EVs on hot days when the grid is stressed already. Mandating that two-thirds of new car sales must be electric will only make this problem worse.
More generally, this proposed ruling is a good example of the kind of thing that I mentioned in last week's blog: the tendency of government leaders to propose progressive-sounding climate-change-prevention measures to go into effect long after they are out of office. By doing this kind of thing, they try to have their political cake and eat it too. They get kudos from their supporters for being on the right side of history, but avoid the all-too-real negative and unintended consequences of their proposals, which may never see the light of day in any case.
The public is not stupid, on average, and there are signs that outside of Washington and certain elite enclaves, anyway, the constant hyperventilating about climate change is losing its luster for the average voter. In Vaclav Smil's book How the World Really Works, Smil points out the huge gaps between the aspirational goals set by international meetings such as the Paris Climate Accords and the realities on the ground of how the world's economy relies on giant systems that must use fossil fuels both now and in the immediately foreseeable future.
No one to my knowledge has proposed a battery-electric cargo ship, for example. The reason is that so much space and weight would have to be occupied by the batteries that the negligible amount of freight transported would be unprofitable. The only non-fossil-fuel power that is practical for large ocean-going vessels is nuclear energy. There are only about 160 nuclear-powered ocean vessels in the world, and the majority of those are nuclear submarines operated by the military. While nuclear energy is a viable option for ships, many ports prohibit nuclear-powered vessels from entering out of safety concerns, and so a sea change (so to speak) would have to occur for nuclear energy to make a dent in shipping.
And nuclear energy is simply not an option for air transport, so until much better battery technology is developed, airliners are going to be burning fossil fuels.
None of this is to deny that the emission of carbon dioxide by human activity contributes to changes in the climate. But the uncertainty and variation in how climate is going to change, and how much our burning of fossil fuels will affect that change, make it unreasonable to impose mandates that produce undue burdens on the majority of a population.
Suppose that tomorrow, all new internal-combustion-engine passenger vehicle sales in the u. S. were banned. In a few years, our transportation infrastructure would go a long way toward resembling that of Cuba, where a very few favored individuals can buy new cars, but everyone else gets by with ancient patched-up vehicles that are many decades old. As my wife and I have learned, today's well-made cars (most of which tend to be Japanese) with care can last twelve or fifteen years, so as long as we could buy gasoline we could deal with such a mandate. But I can easily imagine the government leveraging the self-driving capability of new electric vehicles to ban older non-self-driving types from certain areas, beginning with urban regions and spreading gradually to the suburbs. So you would have an even greater divide between rural and urban than we do now: urbanites zooming around drinking their lattés and reading their smart phones in their self-driving cars, and impoverished rural citizens driving their gas-guzzlers and hunting down bootleg gas stations in small towns in the countryside.
It is a weird and unsatisfactory picture, to say the least. But something like this would result if the Biden administration had the courage of its convictions and imposed rules soon enough to deal with some of the adverse consequences they generate. And putting off the rules won't make them any better. It will simply delay the inevitable disruptions that unreasonable government mandates cause, without visiting the consequences on those whose bad idea it was.
Perhaps sanity will prevail, and the outcries over the proposed EPA rulings will persuade the unelected bureaucrats in that agency to modify their demands. That already seems to be happening with previous climate-change commitments that are "honored more in the breach than in the observance." But sometimes that's a good thing.
Sources: I referred to these articles on the National Review website: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-unveils-strictest-ever-emissions-standards-in-bid-to-remake-auto-industry/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/bidens-draconian-electric-car-mandate/. I also referred to the websites https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx and https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-global-number-of-containerships-from-2011 for shipping statistics.
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