There has been a leveling off in sales of EV’s in America…
The President, looking for another term , is also in a tough political (and likely legal) place from those who make their living from gas driven vehicles….
EV’s are only 4% of vehicles in America…
The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.
Nearly three years in the making, the new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency would transform the American automobile market. A record 1.2 million electric vehicles rolled off dealers’ lots last year, but they made up just 7.6 percent of total U.S. car sales, far from the 56 percent target under the new regulation. An additional 16 percent of new cars sold would be hybrids.
Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history. Electric vehicles are central to President Biden’s strategy to confront global warming, which calls for cutting the nation’s emissions in half by the end of this decade. But E.V.s have also become politicized and are becoming an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign….
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The transition to electric vehicles would require enormous changes in manufacturing, infrastructure, technology, labor, global trade and consumer habits.
And it has become politically fraught. Former President Donald J. Trump, who is campaigning to retake the White House from Mr. Biden in November, has sought to weaponize electric vehicles, repeating false claims during campaign rallies about their performance and affordability and using increasingly heated rhetoric. Most recently, he warned of a “blood bath” in the middle of remarks about electric vehicles…
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The rules are expected to face an immediate legal challenge by a coalition of fossil fuel companies and Republican attorneys general, complaints that are likely to wind their way to the Supreme Court.
“They may wish for us all to drive E.V.s or no cars at all, but at the end of the day that’s not their decision,” said Elizabeth Murrill, the attorney general of Louisiana, a major oil and gas producing state that has been involved in a series of lawsuits challenging the Biden E.P.A. “There is a limit to their authority to remake society in their own vision and the court has realized that.”….