“This is a paradigm shift,” a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday.
Biden will sign an order setting the national 50 percent by 2030 goal at an event later on Thursday at the White House alongside representatives from the three major U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler — and the United Auto Workers. In addition to fully electric vehicles, the target will also include plug-in hybrids, which have gasoline engines to backup their batteries, and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, which currently make up a tiny fraction of U.S. sales.
The target isn’t binding on consumers or automakers, but sets expectations for action over the coming decade, said the official who conducted the press briefing.
“One of the things we’ve seen in jurisdictions around the country and around the world is the power of providing increasing amounts of market clarity in terms of where we are headed,” the official said.
Automakers will announce their own additional goals on Thursday, according to the official, building off GM’s pledge that all its vehicles will be electric by 2035 and similar targets from some other automakers.
The big three U.S. automakers and many foreign manufacturers appear to be unified behind Biden’s strategy, even after many lobbied former President Donald Trump just four years ago to slash the Obama-era standards that they felt were too aggressive. The industry ultimately had to talk Trump back from completely gutting federal tailpipe standards and from starting a regulatory war with California that threatened to split the country into two separate auto markets.
In a statement, the three U.S. companies said the “dramatic shift” in the market would only be reached if the Biden administration enacted the “full suite of electrification policies committed to by the Administration in the Build Back Better Plan, including purchase incentives, a comprehensive charging network of sufficient density to support the millions of vehicles these targets represent, investments in R&D, and incentives to expand the electric vehicle manufacturing and supply chains in the United States.”
Those incentives, particularly Biden’s plan to pour $174 billion into speeding the adoption of electric vehicles, have hit some roadblocks. The bipartisan infrastructure plan that is moving through the Senate saw funding for a network of chargers across the country cut to $7.5 billion, while lawmakers have expressed some skepticism about pushing electric vehicles given the lack of a domestic supply chain that will force automakers to rely largely on imported materials from China.
But United Autoworkers President Ray Curry said in a statement the industry was at a critical time as countries compete to build the vehicles of the future.
“We are falling behind China and Europe as manufacturers pour billions into growing their markets and expanding their manufacturing. We need to make investments here in the United States,” he said.
In addition to Biden’s executive order, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will propose twin rules (Reg. 2060-AV13, Reg. 2127-AM32) strengthening federal tailpipe standards through 2026, partly reversing changes made by the Trump administration.
The White House did not specify fleet-wide targets for 2023 through 2026 on Wednesday, saying only that the proposals will “build on the momentum” of the 2019 California framework the state struck with Ford and four other manufacturers. Environmentalists have argued that while the California plan was better than Trump’s federal rules, it falls short given the need to exceed the Obama-era standards to make up for lost time.
The proposed tailpipe rules overall would yield $140 billion in net benefits over the program’s lifetime, according to the White House, including reducing gasoline demand by 200 billion gallons and carbon emissions by 2 billion metric tons.
And Biden will direct the agencies to start work on additional fuel economy and emissions rules for later this decade — both for light-duty cars and trucks and for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles like buses, delivery trucks, garbage haulers and 18-wheeler cargo carriers, which represent an outsize portion of carbon dioxide pollution. Those rules will be proposed at a later date.
Environmentalists welcomed Biden’s new moves as a step in the right direction. But uncertainty about how aggressive the emissions and mileage regulations for the second half of the decade has many reserving judgment. And climate activists aren’t doing any backflips over the voluntary agreement either.
“A voluntary agreement is completely unacceptable,” said Katherine Garcia, acting director for the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign. “Too much is at stake for a voluntary agreement to meet the moment and to deliver on EPA’s mission.”
Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Transport Campaign at the Center for Biological Diversity, expressed skepticism that automakers would meet “unenforceable” voluntary targets.
“These are the companies that tore up the agreement they made with President Obama to cut pollution, so why would anyone trust them now?” he said.
Environmentalists have instead pushed for a mandatory nationwide increase of electric vehicle sales to 60 percent of all sales by 2030, and for all passenger vehicle sales to be electric by 2035. Such rapid change is necessary because new vehicles can remain on the road for 15 years or more, they say, so meeting emissions goals of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 requires earlier action.
That’s a huge step up from the 2.75 percent market share held in June by fully electric vehicles, according to a report from the industry group Alliance for Automotive Innovation. All zero-emissions vehicles represented 3.8 percent of sales that month.
Environmentalists are already gearing up to scour the rule for compliance flexibilities — or, for critics, loopholes. That includes an extra credit feature put in place via a preceding Obama administration rule that was meant to boost electric vehicle sales; known as a multiplier, it provided automakers with extra compliance credits for selling electric vehicles. Environmentalists may also target so-called off-cycle credits that reward technologies such as solar reflective paint or “variable crankcase suction valve compressors” that can reduce emissions but don’t show up in the regulatory test cycle.
In both cases, critics have argued that the flexibilities effectively shield automakers from having to make more stringent reductions in tailpipe emissions and undermine the program’s effects.
“Any sort of giveaways and flexibilities, off-cycle credits — all of those weaken the rule … and [don’t] deliver the real-world benefits that we need,” said Garcia.
The administration official on Wednesday did not reveal any specifics about such compliance flexibilities, saying instead that “we look forward to the breadth of the stakeholders taking advantage of the public notice and comment process to help these rules be as strong as they can be.”
The administration must act quickly to finalize the proposal in time for manufacturers to apply it to model year 2023 vehicles.
Separately, EPA and NHTSA are working to restore California’s waiver giving it greater regulatory power over cars (Reg. EPA-HQ-OAR-2021-0257). That was stripped away by the Trump administration to stop the deep blue state, and the now 14 other states that follow its rules, from enforcing standards more stringent than the federal rules.
