President Joe Biden has repeatedly called climate change an “existential threat,” worse than nuclear weapons.
Yet, Biden’s green energy mandates result in a greater U.S. demand for wind turbines, solar panels and electric batteries from China, made by coal-fired power plants, increasing the emissions Biden criticizes at home.
The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that in the absence of reductions in carbon emissions, temperatures will rise by about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The idea that such a temperature change is worse than deaths from nuclear weapons is ludicrous. Over 200,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after America dropped atomic bombs.
Temperatures have varied for centuries. Climate models are not reliable and accurate enough to attribute global warming to human activities. The observed rate of global warming over the past 50 years has been weaker than that predicted by almost all computerized climate models.
Thirty-six computer models overpredicted surface air temperatures during the summer growing season. The models all showed warming well above what happened in reality, with the most extreme model producing seven times too much warming.
Increases in hurricane frequency are erroneously cited as an effect of warming. Although carbon dioxide emissions and temperature — both in America and globally — have increased over the latter parts of the 20th Century, no meaningful increase in frequency and intensity of hurricanes has been observed.
Hurricane damage has increased over time, but this outcome is largely due to increased incomes and wealth, and therefore infrastructure creation, rather than more violent hurricanes. For example, homes in Florida have risen by a factor of 12 since 1975, according to the St Louis Federal Reserve Bank. The same hurricane that in 1975 destroyed a house worth $100,000 would now destroy a house worth $1.2 million.
Although some say that increased CO2 levels are detrimental to human health and welfare, deaths are more likely to result from medical events triggered by the cold than by the heat.
A 2020 study by Dr. Whanhee Lee and others in Lancet showed that cold-related morbidity and mortality — strokes, heart attacks, blood clots, and other problems — result directly from the influence of cold temperatures on the body, where the body is unable to maintain sufficient core temperature to guarantee survival.
In addition, Environmental Protection Agency data shows that death rates are about 10 percent higher in winter, and January is the deadliest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
If Biden truly thought that climate change was an existential threat, he would try to lower global emissions through greater U.S. exports of natural gas. This would enable other countries to reduce emissions by substituting natural gas for coal, just as America has reduced carbon emissions by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years.
In addition, Biden would try to expand emissions-free nuclear power if he thought climate change was a threat. He would make uranium mining easier, because uranium is a critical ingredient for nuclear power. Yet he has taken swaths of land off the table for uranium development and made no attempt to solve the problem of nuclear waste.
Instead, Biden blocks a new liquid natural gas export terminal in Louisiana, which results in greater worldwide use of coal, increasing global carbon dioxide emissions. Europe has already been turning to coal to deal with energy shortages in the aftermath of Russia’s cutoff of natural gas.
Over the past 20 years, U.S. emissions of CO2 have declined by a billion metric tons as natural gas has been increasingly substituted for coal use in the generation of electricity. Over the same period, CO2 emissions in China have risen by 8.7 billion metric tons.
Biden’s repetition that climate change is an existential threat gives him an excuse to impose more regulations and sign into law subsidies for favored donors.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said Amb. Rahm Emanuel when he was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Biden is inventing the crisis and the waste is following.
Diana Furchtgott-Rothis a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and directs the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation.
One week the Environmental Protection Agency comes for our gasoline-powered cars, the next for our diesel-powered trucks.
EPA chose Good Friday, when many Americans were preparing to celebrate Easter Sunday (if not Transgender Day of Visibility), to release a new rule requiring that 25% of truck sales be electric by 2032.
Practically everything Americans use comes by truck, either all the way from the producer or from ports or railroad terminals. That’s why, if electric truck and charging technology existed, EPA’s new rule would raise costs of everything Americans buy, resulting in higher prices for goods and services and inflationary pressures throughout the economy.
All this at a time when the Federal Reserve is trying to get inflation down to 2%.
But America doesn’t have the electrical grid capacity, the charging stations, or the technology to operate long-haul electric trucks, and the nation won’t have them by 2032.
Trucking and utility companies would have to invest almost $1 trillion in charging infrastructure before electric trucks could be operational. EPA’s goals either will have to be discarded or moved steadily into the future.
The electric truck rule follows regulations released last month that would require 70% of cars and light trucks, such as pickup trucks, to be electric by 2032. Both these rules will face court challenges on the grounds that EPA exceeded its authority.
EPA’s stated rationale is to reduce emissions, but electrifying trucks would have minimal effect on global temperatures while raising transportation costs and therefore inflation.
The differences in the costs of diesel and electric trucks are monumental, and only a government official with no trucking experience could consider one a substitute for another.
A diesel truck costs about $120,000; an electric truck costs in the range of $450,000 to $500,000. Trucking companies would have to raise prices to cover these costs, and small trucking companies simply couldn’t afford the higher costs and would go out of business.
Not only that, but a proposed power plant rule from the EPA, soon to be released in final form, would make electricity more expensive. This rule, not mentioned in EPA’s vehicle tailpipe regulations, would require power plants to sequester 90% of their carbon emissions by 2039 or close in 2040.
Although smaller commercial trucks, including school buses and utility trucks, often travel locally and can be charged at depots overnight, heavy-duty trucks transport goods for long distances. These larger electric trucks can’t carry loads as heavy as diesel trucks do, because they lose range. So businesses need more trucks to carry a given volume of product, which raises transportation costs.
Electric trucks now have a range of 230 to 310 miles, and generally must stop and recharge when battery strength falls below 20%. Truckers would have to recharge every 180 to 250 miles, which can take one to two hours.
Long-haul electric trucks also can’t travel as many miles in a day, because truckers are limited to 11 hours on the road, and recharging time comes out of that.
Truckers are already in high demand, with 80,000 estimated job vacancies. Because of growing e-commerce, more trucks are needed, rather than fewer.
Requiring truckers to stop for two hours to recharge would reduce earnings and make these jobs less desirable. Some drivers would quit, and others would have to be paid more to remain on the job.
EPA calls the costs of truck electrification “billions of dollars’ worth of investments from trucking fleets, vehicle manufacturers, and U.S. states,” as though these investments would have a positive rate of return. But the costs would be borne by all Americans in the form of higher prices.
EPA’s massive project to reshape America’s transportation system would lower economic growth and increase the budget deficit as manufacturers attempt to comply with regulations and use green tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act to waste resources investing in products that are unsuited to companies’ needs.
EPA justifies its regulation on the grounds that America would have cleaner air as a result. But electric trucks are not emissions-free and impose costs on the environment that gasoline-powered cars don’t.
Electricity for battery-powered vehicles comes from coal and natural gas, not renewable energy sources. Solar, wind, and nuclear power are generally fully used for other purposes; additional sources of energy to meet demand for electricity come from fossil fuels and hydropower.
Batteries for electric heavy trucks are produced in China using energy from coal-fired power plants. Producing batteries for electric vehicles uses carbon; the longer the range of the battery, the more carbon is used.
Large electric trucks need two 8,000-pound batteries. Miners have to move 500,000 pounds of earth to get enough critical minerals for one 1,000-pound passenger car battery, according to physicist Mark Mills, and multiple quantities of these minerals would be required for electric trucks.
Mining for critical minerals is environmentally disruptive. America outsources the work to Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
In 2022, the Supreme Court concluded in West Virginia v. EPA that EPA had overstepped its authority in its 2015 Clean Power Plan by forcing states to shut down power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts described the plan as “a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself.”
Now, in a similar sleight of hand, the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to determine what vehicles are allowed on the road, adopting a program that Congress has not voted into law.
EPA wants to require the purchase of electric trucks because companies wouldn’t use them otherwise—just as the agency is requiring more passenger vehicles to be electric than Americans want to buy.
It is pure illusion to think that America’s commerce could run on electric trucks. The size and composition of the batteries, the network of charging stations, and the electricity to run those stations make this whole enterprise fantastical.
Far more people believe in the Easter Bunny than believe that EPA will succeed in this particular mission.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment and the Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow.
