The Biden administration is advancing its war on fossil fuels, and you’re going to pay for it.
In July, President Joe Biden’s Department of Transportation released a Corporate Average Fuel Economy rule that will dramatically shape the auto industry.
The new rule, created quietly by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, mandates absurdly high fuel efficiency standards of 66 miles per gallon of gas for passenger cars and 54 miles per gallon for pick-up trucks by 2032.
For comparison, the average car in 2020 got 24 miles per gallon, and the average truck got 17 miles per gallon, according to the Department of Energy.
This rule is among the myriad stringent regulations the Biden administration has slapped on the oil and auto industries that will impose significant costs on Americans as the administration promotes electric vehicles.
“The new proposed regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency would require new car sales to be 60% battery-powered electric by 2030 and 67% by 2032 in order for automakers to be in compliance with the new regulations, compared with fewer than 6% in 2022,” Heritage Foundation energy expert Diana Furchtgott-Roth wrote in April. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Switching to electric vehicles potentially would slap a significant cost on consumers. Given surging prices for raw materials needed to make them, electric cars currently cost $20,000 more on average than other vehicles, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Federal agencies must have a “notice and comment” period for new rules, which means the public has the chance to weigh in before a rule is implemented.
Heritage Action for America, an independent partner organization of The Heritage Foundation, created a portal to allow Americans to leave a comment easily before the deadline expires Monday, Oct. 16.
This isn’t exactly how the Founding Fathers drew up our self-governing republic, but at least we have a mechanism for average Americans to be heard on decisions that will dramatically affect their lives.
It’s clear that Biden is following California’s lead—that’s never a good sign—and ultimately trying to eliminate gas-powered vehicles by government force.
The California Air Resources Board mandated in 2022 that all cars sold in California be “zero-emissions vehicles” by 2035. Biden’s new rule puts the U.S. on a slower timeline, but aims at similar results.
Steve Bradbury, a distinguished fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former acting secretary of the Transportation Department, said Biden administration officials are “working as hard as they can to push this requirement through and actually force automakers to convert to electric vehicles much faster and much more broadly than market demand could possibly support.”
Of course, even if vehicles become “emission free,” that doesn’t mean we would be free of emissions. It would shift the emissions and environmental impact somewhere else.
“What the regulations don’t seem to take into account is that electric cars don’t have tailpipe emissions, but their batteries are charged using electricity,” Furchtgott-Roth wrote. “And much of electricity production—unless it’s from renewables, hydropower, or nuclear energy—still results in carbon emissions.”
Currently, 70% of the world’s electric batteries are produced in China and, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 83% of China’s energy comes from fossil fuels.
So, this rule simply would export carbon emissions elsewhere instead of eliminating them, and make us more dependent on Communist China to boot.
It’s America last, as always with this administration.
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