The EV Bubble Is About to Burst |
When did getting from point A to point B get so complicated? When the government decided which cars Americans should buy. With the economic and scientific premises behind electric vehicle (EV) mandates collapsing, the EV bubble may burst completely. There is one mandate left to burst: California’s Advanced Clean Cars II (ACC II) regulation, which requires all new vehicles to be 100 percent electric by 2035, or else automakers get penalized.
With the federal repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Endangerment Finding in February, the government’s formal scientific basis for EV mandates is gone. State governments no longer have a rational scientific basis for requiring EV sales.
The concept of an EV mandate was first made formal policy by the Biden administration when it issued its de facto EV mandate in the form of a 2024 executive order, which changed EPA standards with the clear goal of forcing consumers to start buying EVs over gas-powered vehicles. Though the Trump administration has reversed this policy at the federal level, nearly a dozen state governments have followed a coercive plan to extend EV mandates.
Yet, as I noted in RealClearEnergy, the reasoning behind EV mandates is extremely dubious. The federal government recently emphasized that carbon dioxide emissions, like those from gas-powered cars, should not be considered a pollutant at all. Ironically, EVs don’t dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to the reliance on conventional hydrocarbons, like coal and natural gas, to power their batteries and charging stations.
In fact, the federal government had never ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were a pollutant until the 2009 politically-motivated determination known as the Endangerment Finding. In 2003, the EPA rejected a petition for the agency to declare CO2 a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. When the Obama........