Biden’s Plan to Kill Gas-Powered Vehicles

Biden’s Plan to Kill Gas-Powered Vehicles

– By Howard Sierer –

It’s not just your paranoia. They really are coming for your gas-powered vehicles or at least, the one you expect to buy to replace your current vehicle.

On March 20, 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a final rule titled “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles”. The EPA says “this rule establishes new, more protective standards to further reduce harmful air pollutant emissions from light-duty and medium-duty vehicles starting with model year 2027.”

The rule has the effect of requiring that electric vehicles (EVs) account for 67 percent of all new passenger car and light-duty truck sales by 2032. It’s all part of the environmental left’s belief that reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in this case carbon dioxide, will limit or halt global warming.

Since the rule would have a direct impact on almost all consumers, forcing most us to buy EVs, it’s likely to run into a skeptical public already buying far fewer EVs than were forecasted by the government and the automobile industry. That skepticism alone could force a dramatic retreat in these new emission standards by the federal government.

The courts will undoubtedly be asked to review the rule, not because they have special expertise on emissions standards or global warming, but because it’s likely that the EPA has grossly overstepped its legal mandate once again. While the EPA has the authority to issue tailpipe emissions standards, Congress never authorized it to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of EVs.

The new rule will be adjudicated in light of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, now known as the Major Questions Doctrine. In that case, the court found that the “EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority… This view of EPA’s authority was not only unprecedented; it also effected a ‘fundamental revision of the statute, changing it from [one sort of] scheme of . . . regulation’ into an entirely different kind.”

The West Virginia case involved coal mining and its impact was primarily felt in Appalachian coal mining states. The new tailpipe regulation will be felt from Hawaii and Alaska to Maine and Florida, impacting almost every American. If there ever was a regulation that involved a “Major Question,” this is it.

The EPA and the Biden administration almost certainly knew that this claim “to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority” would be struck down by the courts. Congress never envisioned that the EPA’s role in its 1970 enabling legislation allowed it to radically transform the coal mining industry, let alone the automobile industry.

Two motives come to mind. First, the Biden administration knows that it will take several years for court challenges to work their way up to the Supreme Court. During this period of uncertainty, automobile manufacturers will need to keep their EV production lines going, hopefully lowering EV costs to make them more acceptable to the public with or without the regulation.

Secondly and for purely political reasons, the regulation will allow the environmental left to portray EV opponents as being in the pockets of the oil and gas industry. Expect to see photos of messy oil drilling rigs in environmentally sensitive places along with refinery photos.

If the rule is sustained, how much environmental good would it do?  I was surprised that our gasoline-powered light-duty vehicles (cars, SUVs and pickup trucks) are responsible for only about 17% of U.S. GHGs according to the EPA and the U.S. is already the lowest emitter of GHGs per unit of gross national product. The environmental left may see this regulation as virtuous, but that’s about all it would accomplish: a virtue signal to the rest of the world.

This regulation was brought to you by the same folks that wanted to eliminate gas cook tops in your kitchen. Given the great uncertainty as to whether reducing manmade GHGs will do much to change global warming, this regulation is way over the top. It’s nothing more than an attempt to bribe and bully manufacturers into making cars they don’t want to make and consumers into buying cars that they do not want to buy.