Electric Vehicles and President Biden’s Climate Agenda (2021)

Thank you. You're doing good to be with you. As part of his administration's broader climate change strategy, President Biden has made investing in electric vehicles, a major focus of his $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure proposal. In this week, he has promoted the importance of technological innovation at a climate summit. But as William Brangham reports, there are still many barriers to those vehicles becoming widespread. Our story is part of an international journalism effort called covering climate now. There's a reason a lot of environmentalists focus on the future of electric cars, because today's cars emit a lot of planet warming gases. As a category, transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., even higher than electricity. And within transportation, light-duty vehicles, like cars and trucks, are the largest source of those emissions.

So now, a president who adores his dad's gas guzzling Corvette, wants to see electric cars rule the road. But getting electric vehicles or EVs for short into widespread use has some obstacles. First among them, according to environmental economist Joshua Lynn, is consumer demand. So right now, electric cars account for about 2% or 3% of the market, meaning 2% or 3% of new vehicles sold each year are electric cars. Tiny, tiny fraction. So it's tiny. It's been growing. It was at 010 years ago. According to a consumer report survey, Americans cite a few reasons for their reluctance. Worry about how far EVs can travel on one battery charge. Concern over the higher upfront cost of EVs, though studies show consumers save even more money over time because they never buy gas. And concern over having enough places to charge an EV's battery.

Many consumers are just not familiar with the technology and haven't written in one. Don't know anybody who has. And also haven't really thought through how much their life changed if they had an electric car. But I'd show the car a little bit. Ronald Keltenbaugh is something of an EV evangelist. He's president of a Washington DC group that promotes them. He told me about the first time he test drove a Tesla Model S, a car famous for its lightning quick acceleration and $70,000 price tag. The sales guy is co-pilot and we're to stop light and he says go ahead and cut it off the line. And the only thing I can compare it to is if you're on a roll coaster that accelerates really fast, it's kind of like that. I think that's one of the great misconceptions is people think you're going to get an electric car. It's only going to go as fast as a golf cart. It's only going to go five miles before it needs to get plugged in and then it's going to take three days to charge up the battery like an old cell phone. That is a big misconception. Once you get people to in the car driving they're seeing it and they're like, oh my gosh. Mr. President, where's the final assembly stop?

To help the rest of the country feel that same enthusiasm. President Biden's American Jobs Plan includes a heavy emphasis on electric vehicles. It calls for $174 billion of investment, including rebates for people who purchase EVs, money for research into better battery technology, encouraging the government's vast fleet of cars and buses to become electric and money to build half a million public charging stations across the country for anyone to use. We're going to provide tax incentives and point of sale rebates to help all American families afford clean vehicles of future. Some states like California have already established mandates to require that a certain percentage of vehicles sold in the state emit zero pollution. And now 12 governors, all Democrats, have sent a letter to the Biden administration urging it to, quote, ensure that all new passenger cars and light duty trucks sold are zero emission no later than 2035. Let's go, America.

Adding to this momentum, several big automakers have announced they're already moving away from gas power. Did you know that Norway sells way more electric cars per capita than the U.S.? Norway. General Motors, one of the biggest automakers in the world, said in just four years it will have over 30 electric models for sale. And that it wants to phase out tailpipe emissions totally for cars, trucks, and SUVs by 2035. Dean Parker is the company's chief sustainability officer. The current data we have says more than 80% of charging happens at home. And there's a large number of current consumers who are able to charge at home. And for them, this will be seamless because the range of these electric vehicles is going to be sufficient for the vast majority of use cases. But even as automakers introduce more electric vehicles, one estimate shows that even by 2050, when electric could be a majority of new car sales, most cars on the road will still be burning gas.

For the true believers, like Ron Keltenbaugh, who's driven his electric car hundreds of miles to Vermont and Detroit, he says there are so many reasons to go electric that they ought to appeal to everyone. You can be an early adopter like tech. You can be a car enthusiast like fast cars. You can be an environmentalist because you're about climate change. You can be a foreign policy, national security person and worry about, you know, nasty governments and oil funding terrorism. Anybody in the political spectrum, you can find a reason why they should love EVs and want to move to them as quick as possible. President Biden's infrastructure plan still has another main hurdle, passage by a divided Congress.