The battle for the climate will require electrifying America’s transportation system. But the Biden administration’s effort to push drivers into electric vehicles is unrealistic — and it risks setting back the country’s whole climate program, legitimizing Republican arguments that the energy transition needed to prevent catastrophic climate change is an ill-wrought, heavy-handed intrusion by the government into Americans’ lives.
The administration appears to be getting the message. Under pressure from carmakers and the United Auto Workers, the Environmental Protection Agency said last month it would reconsider stringent proposed emissions regulations that would have required EVs to account for 67 percent of new passenger cars and light-duty trucks sold by 2032, up from 7.6 percent last year.
The moment requires more than just softening rules to acknowledge union and industry gripes, however. The administration should shift the transition to a perhaps slower but more plausible path — one that acknowledges the many obstacles blocking a quick, mass electrification of the light vehicle fleet. Many American drivers remain reluctant to replace their gas-powered cars and trucks with electric vehicles. EV sales are slowing, prompting several carmakers to pare back their production schedules. This is understandable. Drivers fear getting stuck on the road without juice, far from stations that can replenish their batteries in reasonable amounts of time.
Even the fastest chargers can take up to an hour to recharge a spent EV battery. And despite rich incentives for charger deployment in the Inflation Reduction Act, there aren’t many at the moment. There are fewer than 10,000 fast public charging stations around the country, according to the Energy Department, alongside 54,000 slower chargers that can take up to 10 hours to charge a car from empty to full. By contrast, there are about 170,000 gas stations where drivers can fill tanks pretty fast.
The good news is that there is an alternative electrification path available that doesn’t rely on unrealistically rapid deployment of charging infrastructure: The administration can open space in its rules to encourage the purchase of plug-in hybrids. These are not just traditional hybrid cars; they have large batteries, albeit not as large as those for full EVs, that can power cars for substantial distances without assistance. But they also have internal combustion engines that kick in when their electric batteries run out.
The Just Stop Oil crowd might see this as an unacceptable favor to the fossil fuel industry. But hybrids can match 80 percent or more of the carbon emissions reductions delivered by full EVs, according to Paul Bledsoe, an environmental policy lecturer at American University. That’s because Americans, on average, drive fewer than 40 miles in a day, which keeps them within the range of the smaller plug-in hybrid battery.
Plug-in hybrids deliver other benefits. They are much cheaper, and they do not require the vast amounts of rare earths and other hard-to-find minerals that EVs need. Mr. Bledsoe, who served on President Bill Clinton’s Climate Change Task Force, says that five plug-in hybrids can be made from the minerals used in one EV.
Washington’s push for full electric vehicles is already forcing a costly reorganization of industry and mining around the world to reduce reliance on China, the world’s overwhelming leader in battery production, which controls much of the existing mineral supply chain. Opening a short transitional phase in which the government includes substantial room for plug-in hybrid vehicles in its vehicle standards would create time for the next generation of battery technologies — which won’t require as many rare minerals — to mature.
The European Union, it’s true, has set 2035 as the year when all new cars in the bloc must produce zero emissions, as have some U.S. states. This would bar plug-in hybrids. But the EV market share of new cars in Europe is double that of the United States. The bloc also enjoys a denser network of charging stations.
And, critically, Europe’s politics are different. The push for full electric vehicles in the United States is one of Republicans’ leading attack lines. EVs’ cost and range issues spur more anxiety here.
Perhaps the best case for hybrid gas/electric cars is that the driving public is embracing them: Worldwide sales of plug-in hybrids spiked 47 percent last year, which was 17 percentage points higher than EVs’ sales growth. Toyota, hybrids’ loudest champion, sold 3.4 million of them last year, earning headlines such as “Was Toyota’s bet on hybrid cars right all along?”
The EV transition will have to happen over the next couple of decades. But forcing an immediate transition to full electric vehicles could produce backlash against the Biden administration’s entire climate change strategy. Encouraging plug-in hybrids first would be like driving through a green light.
