President Biden on Thursday announced a multistep strategy aimed at rapidly shifting Americans from gasoline-powered cars and trucks toward electric vehicles — a central part of his plan to reduce the pollution that is heating the planet.
Mr. Biden is first restoring and slightly strengthening auto mileage standards to the levels that existed under President Barack Obama but were weakened during the Trump administration. The new rules, which would apply to vehicles in the model year 2023, would cut about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced annually by the United States and prevent the burning of about 200 billion gallons of gasoline over the lifetime of the cars, according to a White House fact sheet.
The administration next plans to draft even more stringent pollution rules for both passenger vehicles and heavy-duty trucks that are designed to compel automakers to ramp up sales of electric vehicles.
“There’s a vision of the future that is now beginning to happen, a future of the automobile industry that is electric — battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, fuel cell electric,” said Mr. Biden, who announced the plan from the South Lawn of the White House before an array of parked electric vehicles, including the Ford F150 Lightning, the Chevrolet Bolt EV and a Jeep Wrangler. “The question is whether we’ll lead or fall behind in the future.”
Mr. Biden’s actions amount to an attempt to overhaul a major American industry in order to better compete with China, which makes about 70 percent of the world’s electric vehicle batteries. In an effort that blends environmental, economic and foreign policy, Mr. Biden wants to retool and expand the domestic supply chain so that the batteries that are essential to electric vehicles are also made in American factories.
“This is the first example of how Biden’s administration would do industrial policy in the climate change context,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.
Without a radical change to the type of vehicles Americans drive, it will be impossible for Mr. Biden to meet his ambitious pledge to cut planet-warming emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of this decade. Gasoline-powered cars and trucks are the largest single source of greenhouse gases produced in the United States, accounting for 28 percent of the country’s total carbon emissions.
He also signed an executive order that calls for the government to try to ensure that half of all vehicles sold in the United States be electric by 2030.
In a signal of industry support, the president was joined on the South Lawn by the chief executives of the nation’s three largest automakers, as well as the head of the United Auto Workers. The automakers pledged that 40 to 50 percent of their new car sales would be electric vehicles by 2030, up from just 2 percent this year, on the condition that Congress passes a spending bill that includes billions of dollars for a national network of electric vehicle charging stations, as well as tax credits to make it cheaper for companies to build the cars and consumers to buy them.