The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working on combatting climate change, and the auto industry will soon feel a huge difference. According to a new report, EPA will have new standards that will eventually phase out gas-powered vehicles.
EPA Will Boost Sales of Electric Vehicles
President Joe Biden wants to cement the climate goals under his administration. He aims to boost sales of electric vehicles (EVs) that will eventually bring an end to the internal combustion engine (ICE), The Verge reported.
According to the proposed EPA regulations, each automaker's annual sales of new vehicles would be subject to an emissions cap. In essence, that cap would guarantee that by 2032, EVs would make up two-thirds of the cars they sold in the US. The complete information is anticipated to be made public on Wednesday.
Making this a reality will need an enormous amount of work. Even though automakers have already started down the road to increasing EV sales, the US market for new cars still doesn't include enough plug-in cars to make a significant dent. It will be unprecedented to get them to where the Biden administration wants them to be, around 68 percent of all automobile sales, from where they are currently at about 7 percent of new car sales, The New York Times.
For instance, in January of this year, 66,416 battery electric vehicles and 14,143 plug-in hybrid vehicles were sold in the United States, accounting for 7.83 percent of all new vehicle sales. In the same month, 950,000 new ICE light-duty vehicles and nearly 3 million used ICE vehicles were sold. President Biden's EPA is essentially attempting to reverse those statistics.
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Changes Not Surprising But Could Be Chaotic
According to Chris Harto, senior policy analyst for transportation and energy at Consumer Reports, neither policymakers nor automakers should be startled by any of this. The EPA has been hinting that these new guidelines, which are approximately in line with Biden's climate goals, would be released this spring. As soon as he took office, the president signed an executive order outlining his goal for by 2030, 50% of all new car sales would be emission-free.
How disruptive this transition will largely rely on how the auto industry reacts, according to Harto. When businesses cannot quickly adapt to changes in consumer demand, technology transitions often become messy, he wrote in an email. The most successful automakers will be those who can adapt quickly to consumer demand shifts, while those who can't risk quickly falling behind.
California is to be credited for this new strategy. To comply with new regulations initially introduced by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020, all new cars sold in the state must be carbon emission-free by 2035, according to the California Air Resources Board.
The adoption of emissions regulations by California, the largest auto market in the US and one of the world's largest in the world, frequently impact the rest of the nation.
Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington are just a few of the states that have now followed California's example and set their timetables for the gradual phase-out of the sale of gas-powered vehicles.
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