Biden’s New Vehicle-Emissions Rules Need Rethinking

L ast month, President Biden proposed new standards aimed at reducing vehicular carbon emissions and saving consumers money. His goals are ambitious and, unfortunately, unlikely to succeed.

The proposed rules aim to expedite the transition to electric vehicles by setting new pollution standards for nearly all road vehicles, including passenger cars and heavy-duty trucks. However important reducing carbon emissions may be, the EV-production expansion that would be needed to meet President Biden’s new standards is completely unrealistic, given the United States’ current geopolitical relationships and the environmental and economic costs of a sweeping transformation in the auto industry.

In the proposal, the EPA estimates that under the new rules, EVs will make up 67 percent of new car purchases by 2032. Currently, electric vehicles make up only 5.6 percent of car registrations, so we have a long way to go: EV registrations would need to double every year for the next ten years to meet the EPA’s goal. This is unlikely to happen while U.S. auto manufacturers are bound to the Inflation Reduction Act, which requires 60 percent of batteries to be made in the U.S. Because China currently dominates the mining and processing of most of the minerals we need for EV batteries, such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel, our ability to produce such batteries is significantly constrained.

As things stand at the moment, the U.S. will have to rely on China for an expansion of EV production on the scale envisioned by the administration, since electric vehicles require six times the mineral input of conventional vehicles, and permitting and environmental regulations have largely prevented the U.S. industry from gaining any traction in the global electric-vehicle supply chain. President Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said last month that the Biden administration “will need to take further steps” to incentivize the domestic mining of key minerals because “there are just certain realities [to the energy transition].” These realities include the need to issue more permits to mine lithium in the U.S. and the massive human-rights problems posed by some of the other countries where EV minerals are mined, such as China and Congo.

While the geopolitical risks from increasing our dependence on China are obvious, there are also environmental issues with President Biden’s EV rules. EV batteries cannot be easily recycled — a problem Wired magazine calls the “e-waste time bomb” — and the production of electric vehicles initially leads to more emissions than the production of petrol cars. There is also a large environmental cost to adding capacity and replacing over 140,000 miles of transmission lines on the aging electric grid, which will need to be upgraded before it can satisfy the increased demand for power created by all the new EVs. The financial cost of these upgrades, estimated to be about $2 trillion, is a significant burden for power providers simultaneously trying to replace fossil fuels with low- and zero-carbon energy sources. So as we rush to adopt EVs, carbon emissions may actually increase, merely shifting from the transportation sector to electricity generation, since a significant portion of the electricity used to power EVs may come from “dirty” sources.

Economically, adopting EVs at the pace that is now being targeted will also intensify shortages in infrastructure funding, since gas taxes support 84 percent of federal and 29 percent of state highway funds. EV drivers do not pay this tax, yet they use the roads. The lost revenue will need to be made up by taxpayers elsewhere.

Altogether, the proposal’s authors expect it to reduce carbon emissions by over 10 billion tons of carbon-dioxide emissions by 2055 — roughly equal to the total amount of emissions produced by the U.S. in 2022.

On top of the geopolitical, environmental, and economic costs already discussed, the proposed rules came after the government recently offered to provide $30 billion in support for EVs and other “clean” forms of transportation. This support includes loans to battery manufacturers, funding for alternative-fuel stations, large procurement contracts for cleaner government vehicles, new tax credits, workforce partnerships, and the creation of a new government office, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation.

While EV-car companies gorge on government subsidies and environmentalists cheer the potential decrease in carbon emissions, others will be left in the cold. The EPA’s rules fail to consider all of the costs for drivers, power companies, our environment, and our geopolitical position — and if they aren’t revised, they may end up being an economic and environmental disaster for the country.