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Here’s where Biden’s climate law is having the biggest impact on the automotive industry — and where it’s falling short.
Around this time last summer, it seemed more apparent than ever that 2023 would be the year the gasoline-free automotive future was set to begin. After a decade that included electric vehicle fits and starts, Volkswagen’s diesel cheating scandal, the rise of Tesla, the EV boom in China, and a whole new generation of car buyers more aware of their personal impact on the climate than ever, it felt like the dawn of an EV-focused tomorrow was just around the corner. All it needed was a spark.
The Inflation Reduction Act, an admittedly poorly named piece of legislation packed with climate and green energy provisions, was meant to be exactly that. On the automotive front, the Biden administration’s signature legislation package included massive subsidies for EV battery plants, strict rules around where cars are produced and batteries are sourced, and a reset on America’s outdated EV tax incentive scheme for car buyers. It seemed grand on a scale not seen since the Johnson years: thousands of jobs, some $100 billion in funding, and a chance for America to kneecap China in the EV arms race.
So a year after the IRA’s passage, is all this investment working? The definitive answer is this: mostly, kinda.
While it’s highly questionable that the IRA has successfully Reduced Inflation, the effect of the legislation on America’s automotive manufacturing landscape has already been palpable. A recent report from the Environmental Defense Fund shows EV industry investments in the U.S. rising in 2021 around the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, before taking off in a near-vertical fashion after the IRA was passed.
I decided to grade the IRA’s impact on America’s automotive sector — not just the Big Three U.S. automakers, but all companies who make cars here and support them — in a few key areas.
What I found is that a year in, the IRA feels like it could permanently reset our car industry. But in some key areas, its effects aren’t even close to being seen, and on other fronts, the IRA has caused a number of unintended consequences that will play out for years to come.
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This is arguably the biggest shift we’ve seen thanks to the IRA, and it’s certainly working.
Making batteries for tomorrow’s EVs won’t be as simple as turning car engine plants into battery plants; the supply chain, manufacturing process, and labor needs are entirely different. And so new facilities are springing up left and right to meet this moment.
The Electrification Coalition, a nonprofit policy organization that advocates for EV adoption, identified more than a dozen battery manufacturing and recycling factories that have been announced or are under construction thanks to IRA incentives. These projects are, on average, $3 billion or more, and they’ll provide batteries for future cars from General Motors, Rivian, Hyundai, Tesla, Volkswagen’s new electric Scout brand, and more.
Would this new battery ecosystem have happened without the IRA? Maybe. But certainly not this quickly or at this scale. The automakers may be moving in the direction of electrification, but it’s doing so begrudgingly and these incentives — coupled with state and local ones as well — gave them a reason to move quicker than “the market” would’ve done.
That’s good news for batteries. What about the cars themselves? Since the IRA heavily incentivizes batteries and EVs to be made locally — which I’ll touch on in a moment — it’s kicking off a surge in U.S. car manufacturing the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades.
While battery factories themselves are getting the lion’s share of the attention and money, automakers are adding new factories, expanding existing ones, and retooling lines to scale up their EV outputs.
Granted, many automakers are still investing heavily into (or hedging their bets on) their profitable gasoline models, especially big trucks and SUVs. But EV production is ramping up in America and that scale should eventually drive prices down. Simply put, if a car company — GM, Ford, Nissan, BMW, Hyundai, all of them — builds in the U.S., they’re about to start making EVs here too.
There’s an undercurrent that can be found across all of the Biden administration’s climate and tech investments: cutting off a rising China in countless areas. It’s why only EVs with “final assembly” in North America, that don’t source batteries or components from China, qualify for tax incentives. China has made huge investments into not only its own EV industry but controlling the supply chain around it, and America doesn’t want to cede that to a potentially hostile, non-allied peer state that has a horrific record on human rights and civic freedoms.
Is it working? So far, yes. However, it’s not going to happen overnight. Just as the Center for Strategic and International Studies called it last year, “in the short term it will be difficult to avoid Chinese supply chains.” That’s true of chips, minerals, and everything else.
Moreover, don’t expect automakers to give up the potential of exporting Chinese-made cars. Tesla already sells China-made EVs in Canada, and Volvo has found a George Washington-era loophole to sell the affordable EX30 electric crossover in America without steep tariff penalties. IRA rules may keep Chinese batteries out of our country and stiff tariffs hamper automakers like BYD for now, but this side of things is far from settled.
Now, it’s time for our lesson in unintended consequences. The new $7,500 EV tax credits have strict requirements; essentially, the cars and their batteries have to be built in North America. Given the long-term nature of these investments, not every automaker with an EV lineup can meet those rules for now, leaving a lot of cars out of the credit. (South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Group, in particular, got pretty burned here, leaving its excellent EVs on the expensive side.)
Long-term, these cars and their batteries will be built locally and more cars will qualify for the tax credit. For now, the high cost of EVs is proving to be a major deterrent to adoption. Buyers, squeezed by interest rates and the rising cost of everything, are having trouble justifying the switch. So far the biggest winner is Tesla, which has always been building EVs and batteries in America.
I think a better approach would’ve been to allow all EVs to qualify for the full tax credit until, say, 2026 or so; after that, and perhaps after a gradual phase-in, automakers would have to build local or charge higher prices. That would’ve given them time to ramp up these factories and pushed EV adoption harder at the same time. At the start of the year, before a ton of EVs and hybrids got kicked out of the program, that’s exactly the trend we saw.
That’s what I would’ve done. But, to date, Joe Biden has not put me in charge of such things.
This one is due to be an objective win for the IRA. That Environmental Defense Fund report counts 84,800 jobs that have been announced for the EV industry in America since the IRA’s passage.
According to their data, nearly all of those are located in Southern states. Georgia’s the biggest winner here, believe it or not. And Tennessee, South and North Carolina, and Kentucky are all seeing, or will soon see, big booms in EV-related job growth. The same is true for Michigan, the home of America’s auto industry, as well as lithium-rich Nevada, where Tesla has had a foothold for years.
Again, there’s another universe where the IRA didn’t pass and all of those jobs went to China instead as America’s automakers put their patriotism on the back burner to chase lower labor costs and easy profits. The U.S. is getting a major employment boost instead.
But there’s a difference between “jobs” and “good jobs.” Take a newly militant United Auto Workers union, currently locked into unusually bitter contract negotiations with the Big Three American automakers. One thing they’re mad about: those battery factories going up everywhere, especially the joint-venture ones, don’t automatically lead to union jobs. (One GM-LG battery plant in Ohio voted to unionize with the UAW last year but doesn’t have a contract yet.)
The result is that those battery plant workers could make considerably less money than America’s unionized auto workers, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported in June. Adding insult to injury, EVs generally need fewer parts and labor than conventional cars to assemble; indeed, those battery plant jobs could one day form the bulk of America’s automotive labor force.
The UAW did support the IRA’s passage last year. But that also happened before the union’s much tougher current leadership came in; I’m not convinced it would have gone the same way today. In general, the law doesn’t do a ton for labor, and that’s why the reliably Democratic UAW has held off on endorsing Biden.
So far, the Biden administration doesn’t have a great answer for this, either. The president himself is doing the “Can’t we all just get along?” dance, but that may be the best he can do as he navigates climate, geopolitical, industry, and labor needs at the same time. And the move to EVs is expected to define the automotive labor world — here and globally — for the next few decades.
As Ryan Cooper astutely noted this week, the IRA’s biggest problem is arguably one of awareness. Very few people seem to know about these investments or what’s coming from them. That lack of awareness could be the IRA’s biggest threat.
Maybe that’s a problem more for Biden than the EV industry, America’s supply chain, or the climate, but when nobody knows about the president’s biggest achievement — especially in all those red states where the jobs are going — you have to wonder what a change at the White House next year could mean for all of this momentum. It’s not like those battery plants under construction will just disappear, but I wouldn’t put it past a less climate-focused White House (or Congress) to find a way to thwart all this progress.
There’s also the rising right-wing backlash to EVs in general, predicated more on the messaging power of the fossil fuel industry and our own endlessly stupid culture wars. In short, though these investments do take time, very few people seem to know about them or see the benefits that will come from them.
Auto industries are always heavily subsidized and regulated by the countries they come from. It was true of Japan after World War II, it’s been true of China for the past 20 years, and it’s certainly been true in various ways in America for a century. The IRA is just the biggest such move the U.S. has seen to modernize, compete and innovate in a world where gas cars could eventually be discarded as obsolete technology.
The groundwork has been laid. Now we’ll find out if it has staying power.
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The Environmental Protection Agency just unveiled its argument against regulating greenhouse emissions from power plants.
In federal policymaking, the weight of the law can rest on a single word. When it comes to reducing planet-warming emissions from the power sector, that word is “significantly.” The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any stationary source of emissions that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The EPA has considered power plants a significant source of dangerous greenhouse gases since 2015. But today, Trump’s EPA said, actually, never mind.
A proposed rule published in the Federal Register on Wednesday argues that U.S. fossil fuel-fired power plants make up “a small and decreasing part of global emissions” and therefore are not significant, and do not require regulation under the law. The rule would repeal all greenhouse gas emission standards for new and existing power plants — both the standards the Biden administration finalized last year, which have been tied up in court, as well as the standards that preceded them, which were enacted by Obama in 2015.
In a separate proposal, the EPA also took steps to repeal limits on mercury and hazardous air pollutants from coal plants that were enacted last year, reverting the standard back to one set in 2012.
The argument that U.S. power plants make up a small sliver of global emissions and thus aren’t worth addressing is like having “a five-alarm fire that could be put out if you send out all the trucks, and you don’t send any of the trucks because no one truck could put the fire out by itself,” David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “We just think that is a wacky reversal and a wacky interpretation of the Clean Air Act.”
When you add up every plug, power button, and light switch across the country, electricity usage produces 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions each year. Over the past 30 years, American power plants have contributed about 5% of the total climate pollution spewed into the atmosphere worldwide.
In the global context, that may sound small. But in a recent report titled “The Scale of Significance," New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that if U.S. power plants were a country, it would be the sixth biggest emitter in the world, behind China, the European Union, India, Russia, and the remainder of U.S. emissions. The report also notes that U.S. actions on emissions make other countries more likely to follow, due to technological spillovers that reduce the cost of decarbonization globally.
In addition to the significance finding, the EPA gave two other reasons for repealing the power plant rules. It argued that “cost-effective control measures are not reasonably available,” meaning there’s no economic way to reduce emissions at the source. It also said the new administration’s priority “is to promote the public health or welfare through energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.”
The first argument is an attempt to say that Biden’s standards flouted the law. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA could not simply tell states to reduce emissions from the power sector, which is what the Obama administration had initially tried to do. Instead, the agency would have to develop standards that could be applied on a plant-by-plant basis — so long as those rules were “cost-reasonable” and “adequately demonstrated.”
To comply with that ruling, Biden’s EPA based its standards on the potential to install carbon capture technology that can reduce flue gas emissions by 90%. The regulations would have required existing coal plants to install carbon capture by 2039, or else shut down. (To the chagrin of many energy system observers, the administration chose not to apply limits to existing gas-fired power plants.) But while fossil fuel companies and utilities had, in the past, asserted that carbon capture was viable, they deemed the standards impossible to meet.
Trump’s EPA is now agreeing. “In 2024,” Zeldin said on Wednesday, “rules were enacted seeking to suffocate our economy in order to protect the environment, to make all sorts of industries including coal and more disappear, regulate them out of existence.”
When Trump moved to overturn Obama’s power plant regulations during his first term, his EPA did not contest the significance of the sector’s emissions, and simply enacted a weaker standard. A week before he left office, the agency also finalized a rule that set the threshold for “significance” at 3% of U.S. emissions — which exempted major polluters like refineries, but still applied to power plants.
This time, Trump has a new apparent game plan: Strip the Clean Air Act of its jurisdiction over greenhouse gases altogether. Today’s action was the first step; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency will similarly “reconsider” emissions rules for cars and oil and gas drilling. But the cornerstone of the plan is to reverse what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — the 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases present a threat to public health and welfare, and therefore are one of the pollutants EPA must address under the Clean Air Act.
“The Trump administration is trying to say, don’t worry about the Clean Air Act. It will never apply, so you can go back to your old ways,” said Doniger. But if the argument that power plant emissions are insignificant is a stretch, appraising greenhouse gas emissions as benign is inconceivable, he said. “The endangerment finding was based, in 2009, on a Denali-sized mountain of evidence. Since then, it’s grown to Everest-size, so there’s no way that they would be able to put together a rational record saying the science is wrong.”
These highly technical questions of whether emissions are “significant” or whether carbon capture is “adequately demonstrated” could soon be determined by a group of people who lack both the expertise to answer them and the inclination to wade through thousands of pages of atmospheric science and chemical engineering documents: judges.
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned a long-held precedent known as Chevron deference. That ruling means that the courts are no longer required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of statute — judges must make their own determinations of whether agencies are following the intent of the law.
When environmental groups begin challenging the EPA’s repeals in court, judges are “going to be bombarded with the need to make these highly technical, nuanced decisions,” Michael Wara, a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy at Stanford University, told me. He said the reason Chevron deference was established in the first place is that judges didn’t want to be making engineering decisions about power plants. “They felt extremely uncomfortable having to make these calls.”
The conservative Supreme Court overturned the precedent because of a sense that political decisions were being dressed up in scientific reasoning. But Wara doesn’t think the courts are going to like being put back into the role of weighing technical minutia and making engineering decisions.
“It’s a past that the courts didn’t like and they tried to engineer a way out of via the Chevron doctrine,” he said. “I would expect that we’re going to see a drift back toward a doctrine that looks a little bit more Chevron-like, maybe less deference to agencies. But it’s hard to predict in the current environment what’s going to happen.”
Look more closely at today’s inflation figures and you’ll see it.
Inflation is slowing, but electricity bills are rising. While the below-expectations inflation figure reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday morning — the consumer price index rose by just 0.1% in May, and 2.4% on the year — has been eagerly claimed by the Trump administration as a victory over inflation, a looming increase in electricity costs could complicate that story.
Consumer electricity prices rose 0.9% in May, and are up 4.5% in the past year. And it’s quite likely price increases will accelerate through the summer, thanks to America’s largest electricity market, PJM Interconnection. Significant hikes are expected or are already happening in many PJM states, including Maryland,New Jersey,Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with some utilities having said they would raise rates as soon as this month.
This has led to scrambling by state governments, with New Jersey announcing hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to alleviate rate increases as high as 20%. Maryland convinced one utility to spread out the increase over a few months.
While the dysfunctions of PJM are distinct and well known — new capacity additions have not matched fossil fuel retirements, leading to skyrocketing payments for those generators that can promise to be on in time of need — the overall supply and demand dynamics of the electricity industry could lead to a broader price squeeze.
“Trump and JD Vance can get off tweets about how there’s no inflation, but I don’t think they’ll feel that way in a week or two,” Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, told me.
And while the consumer price index is made up of, well, almost everything people buy, electricity price increases can have a broad effect on prices in general. “Everyone relies on energy,” Amarnath said. “Businesses that have higher costs can’t just eat it.” That means higher electricity prices may be translated into higher costs throughout the economy, a phenomenon known as “cost-push inflation.”
Aside from the particular dynamics of any one electricity market, there’s likely to be pressure on electricity prices across the country from the increased demand for energy from computing and factories. “There’s a big supply adjustment that’s going to have to happen, the data center demand dynamic is coming to roost,” Amarnath said.
Jefferies Chief U.S. Economist Thomas Simons said as much in a note to clients Wednesday. “Increased stress on the electrical grid from AI data centers, electric vehicle charging, and obligations to fund infrastructure and greenification projects have forced utilities to increase prices,” he wrote.
Of course, there’s also great uncertainty about the future path of electricity policy — namely, what happens to the Inflation Reduction Act — and what that means for prices.
The research group Energy Innovation has modeled the House reconciliation bill’s impact on the economy and the energy industry. The report finds that the bill “would dramatically slow deployment of new electricity generating capacity at a time of rapidly growing electricity demand.” That would result in higher electricity and energy prices across the board, with increases in household energy spending of around $150 per year in 2030, and more than $260 per year in 2035, due in part to a 6% increase in electricity prices by 2035.
In the near term, there’s likely not much policymakers can do about electricity prices, and therefore utility bills going up. Renewables are almost certainly the fastest way to get new electrons on the grid, but the completion of even existing projects could be thrown into doubt by the House bill’s strict “foreign entity of concern” rules, which try to extricate the renewables industry from its relationship with China.
“We’re running into a set of cost-push dynamics. It’s a hairy problem that no one is really wrapping their heads around,” Amarnath said. “It’s not really mainstream yet. It’s going to be.”
In some relief to American consumers, if not the planet, while it may be more expensive for them to cool their homes, it will be less expensive to get out of them: Gasoline prices fell 2.5% in May, according to the BLS, and are down 12% on the year.
Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.
Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.
However, I have learned that the wind industry’s worst fears are indeed coming to pass. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for approving any activity impacting endangered birds, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with greenlighting construction in federal wetlands, have simply stopped processing wind project permit applications after Trump’s orders – and the freeze appears immovable, unless something changes.
According to filings submitted to federal court Monday under penalty of perjury by Alliance for Clean Energy New York, at least three wind projects in the Empire State – Terra-Gen’s Prattsburgh Wind, Invenergy’s Canisteo Wind, and Apex’s Heritage Wind – have been unable to get the Army Corps or Fish and Wildlife Service to continue processing their permitting applications. In the filings, ACE NY states that land-based wind projects “cannot simply be put on a shelf for a few years until such time as the federal government may choose to resume permit review and issuance,” because “land leases expire, local permits and agreements expire, and as a result, the project must be terminated.”
While ACE NY’s filings discuss only these projects in New York, they describe the impacts as indicative of the national industry’s experience, and ACE NY’s executive director Marguerite Wells told me it is her understanding “that this is happening nationwide.”
“I can confirm that developers have conveyed to me that [the] Army Corps has stopped processing their applications specifically citing the wind ban,” Wells wrote in an email. “As I have understood it, the initial freeze covered both wind and solar projects, but the freeze was lifted for solar projects and not for wind projects.”
Lots of attention has been paid to Trump’s attacks on offshore wind, because those projects are sited entirely in federal waters. But while wind projects sited on private lands can hypothetically escape a federal review and keep sailing on through to operation, wind turbines are just so large in size that it’s hard to imagine that bird protection laws can’t apply to most of them. And that doesn’t account for wetlands, which seem to be now bedeviling multiple wind developers.
This means there’s an enormous economic risk in a six-month permitting pause, beyond impacts to future energy generation. The ACE NY filings state the impacts to New York alone represent more than $2 billion in capital investments, just in the land-based wind project pipeline, and there’s significant reason to believe other states are also experiencing similar risks. In a legal filing submitted by Democratic states challenging the executive order targeting wind, attorneys general listed at least three wind projects in Arizona – RWE’s Forged Ethic, AES’s West Camp, and Repsol’s Lava Run – as examples that may require approval from the federal government under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. As I’ve previously written, this is the same law that bird conservation advocates in Wyoming want Trump to use to reject wind proposals in their state, too.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers declined to comment after this story’s publication due to litigation on the matter. I also reached out to the developers involved in these projects to inquire about their commitments to these projects in light of the permitting pause. We’ll let you know if we hear back from them.