The
Environmental Protection Agency
has proposed new vehicle emissions standards that will essentially force America’s auto industry to produce
electric vehicles
regardless of public preferences.
Under the guise of the
Clean Air Act
’s authority to regulate tailpipe pollutants, the EPA has made carbon dioxide emissions standards for 2027-2032 so strict that automakers must fundamentally transition to electric vehicles to remain compliant. Let’s be clear, it is simply not the role of the federal government to tell the people what kind of cars we can and cannot drive. Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal bureaucracy granted this power, nor has Congress delegated said authority. These burdensome regulations represent an effort by the administrative state to create law.
SUPREME COURT CAN STOP CLIMATE ACTIVISTS FROM TRYING TO CIRCUMVENT CONGRESS
Even though these new regulations come at the financial expense of the people, they lack input from the voters. By operating through the bureaucracy to make law, rather than our elected officials in Congress, the Biden administration is undermining our constitutional processes to achieve its political goals. If President Joe Biden wants to transition our country to EVs, he should do so through Congress, where our elected officials can publicly deliberate on the merits of such a policy.
In this case, one can only wonder if the Biden administration is ignoring the wishes of the people intentionally. According to the Energy Information Administration, EVs are only expected to make up a total of 15% of auto sales in 2030 and 19% by 2050. Indeed, there are a number of good reasons consumers would opt for traditional vehicles over EVs, including the price of the vehicle, higher insurance costs, limited battery range, and extended charging times. In each of these categories, EVs perform worse than most internal combustion engine vehicles, and it shouldn’t be surprising that EVs are most popular in the luxury vehicle class rather than the mass market.
This consumer preference prevails even in light of massive EV and green energy tax cuts and subsidies, funded by the taxpayer. According to one Goldman Sachs report, taxpayers could be on the hook for a staggering $523 billion over 10 years for electric-vehicle consumer and battery-production tax cuts alone. Nonetheless, California, Oregon, and Washington all have laws on the books banning the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035. This comes in spite of the fact that electric grid operators are already unable to keep up with energy demand, particularly in California, where rolling energy blackouts are becoming the norm during the summer months.
These EV laws also fail to address the lack of existing infrastructure needed to transmit the energy to the neighborhoods, office buildings, and public places where it will be required. Even the European Union, which also initially approved a measure to phase out traditional vehicle sales by 2035, has backtracked on the ban out of concern for the enormous costs.
This sort of centrally planned, top-down government-directed economy is the antithesis of the American free-market system, and it ignores the principles of liberty and freedom that made us the world economic powerhouse to begin with. It was individual actors unleashed by the power of the free market that created the innovations and advancements that built the strongest economy in the history of the world. It was not regulators in the federal bureaucracy.
Green energy is generally a good thing, and it may very well be a viable energy source for the future economy. But government regulation, coercion, and restriction of the free-market processes to force green energy initiatives on the public without regard to the cost is fundamentally un-American.
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Dr. Ben Carson is the founder and chairman of the
American Cornerstone Institute
.
