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The United States reportedly plans to pull back on new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules that would have required car manufacturers to make EVs their primary business by 2032.
According to The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, industry players have convinced the Biden administration to give them more time to make the change, enabling costs to go down and more of the nation’s infrastructure to be built out at a time when interest in electric vehicles is in flux.
Labor leaders also reportedly asked the administration for more time to bring individuals working in new US EV plants into their unions. The Times notes that unions are likely critical to Biden’s re-election aspirations.
According to the Times, the EPA’s existing regulations were designed so that 67% of cars and light-duty trucks would be electric by 2032, up from the 7.6% of EVs that were made in 2023.
“That remains the goal. But as they finalize the regulations, administration officials are tweaking the plan to slow the pace at which auto manufacturers would need to comply, so that electric vehicle sales would increase more gradually through 2030 but then would have to sharply rise.”
While postponing until 2030 would have the same effect as the original plan by 2055, it means we’ll have a lot more emissions in the short term.
“You’ll have faster warming if US transportation emissions don’t decline before 2030,” James Glynn, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told the paper.
Scientists have warned that if the average global temperature increases more than 1.5 degrees compared with preindustrial levels, “humans would struggle to adapt to increasingly violent storms, floods, fires, heat waves and other disruptions.”