The Biden Administration Is Trying to Kickstart the Great American Electric Vehicle Race

American tailpipes have played an outsized role in global warming. In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of the country’s human-generated emissions, the most of any sector tracked by the Environmental Protection Agency—and the U.S. is the world’s second-largest carbon emitter. The Biden Administration wants to clean up transportation’s dirty reputation, and make America the global leader in electric vehicle production in the process. At the moment, electric vehicles, or EVs, aren’t particularly common in the U.S. Only about 2% of vehicles sold in the U.S. last year were electric. “It looks like, somewhere around 5% of sales is where things really start to take off”—when EV’s transition from the novel to the ordinary—says Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at BloombergNEF. Experts say that smart government policy can nudge the consumer market towards that tipping point. Indeed, it’s already happened in other countries. In Norway, for example, the government has built a massive charging infrastructure and subsidizes free parking for EV owners in many parts of the country, and exempts EV drivers from certain taxes and road tolls. That’s likely part of the reason that 54% of new cars sold in 2020 in Norway were EVs. Similarly, in China, government subsidies and investment in charging infrastructure have led to a robust and competitive market, with over 400 automakers producing EVs for drivers ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news