Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Electric Vehicles

Trump Waged a Multi-Front Blitz on EVs

Among other actions, he overturned an electric vehicle mandate that, well, doesn’t exist.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Ding dong, the electric vehicle “mandate” is dead.

President Donald Trump fulfilled his longtime campaign promise on Monday by functionally ending former President Joe Biden’s tailpipe emissions standards, which had aimed to “accelerate the ongoing transition to a clean vehicles future and tackle the climate crisis.”

As part of his “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, signed Monday night in the Oval Office, Trump specifically demanded the elimination of “the electric vehicle mandate,” ordered a “level regulatory playing field for consumer choice in vehicles,” and directed the termination of “state emission waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles,” as well as the elimination of “unfair subsidies … that favor EVs.”

Though the finer details of how this will be implemented aren’t clear in the executive order, there has never been an actual electric vehicle mandate. The rules under Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency would have required a gradual reduction in fleetwide average carbon emissions by up to 56% by 2032. To meet that goal, electric vehicles would have needed to make up 35% to 56% of new car sales by 2032, up from 8% in 2024. According to the Biden administration, the rule would have cut more than 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions through 2055, or “roughly equal to four times the emissions of the entire transportation sector in 2021.”

Trump’s executive order also appeared to target the Biden administration’s fuel economy standards. Back in June, the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a rule that raised the fleetwide average fuel economy of passenger cars for model years 2027 through 2031 by 2% each year — that is, to 47 miles per gallon in 2026 and to 50.4 miles per gallon in 2031. (The current average is around 39.1 miles per gallon.)

Republicans overwhelmingly opposed the rules, known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE Standards, arguing they “effectively mandate EVs while at the same time forcing the internal combustion engine out of the market.” The GOP has insisted that the CAFE Standards should be “market-driven” rather than “limit availability of and access to vehicle and fuel options.” Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the Trump administration, called for a fuel efficiency standard of 35 mpg.

CAFE Standards have long been a political football between administrations; Trump previously rolled back President Barack Obama’s standards, while Biden’s NHTSA brought even stricter rules.

Monday’s executive order additionally appeared to target the EPA’s waiver for California to set its own emissions standards under the Clean Air Act in its language targeting “state emission waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.” Trump previously revoked California’s right to include greenhouse gases in its emissions considerations and barred other states from adopting its criteria. Biden reversed that decision in March 2022, on the grounds that the Trump administration’s withdrawal was based on a flawed interpretation of the Clean Air Act. Since then, California released its Advanced Clean Cars II standard, which 11 other states have adopted and requires all new cars sold by 2035 to be zero-emission.

It had been no secret that the California waiver would be a target of the incoming Trump administration, despite the program being a secret profit center for Tesla and supported by Elon Musk. California has also quietly been working to Trump-proof its standards, reaching an agreement recently with Stellantis (the parent automaker of Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram) to comply voluntarily with its electrification mandates through 2030. (As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has noted, the nationwide EPA rules for tailpipe emission reductions “follow a different model than the California standards,” and are not an electric vehicle mandate.)

By directing the EPA to revoke the California waiver, Trump has started a process that could lead to the Supreme Court. Last month, the Justices declined to consider whether or not California has the right to set its own aggressive tailpipe standards, but if Trump indeed attempts to rescind the waiver, it will likely face further legal challenges.

Taken together, the “Unleashing American Energy” executive order seems designed to deliver on Trump’s frequent campaign attacks on EVs on the 2024 campaign trail, where he argued that “under Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all U.S. auto jobs will disappear.” Heatmap’s own investigation found little evidence to suggest that making electric vehicles will result in fewer jobs. Trump’s tune on EVs had changed in recent months, however, as he grew closer to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

It’s true, also, that executive orders are not the automatic rule of law; many of the policies will face time-consuming new rulemaking processes or legal challenges. More clarity about what the “Unleashing American Energy” order does precisely, and how it will be implemented, will become clear in the weeks and months ahead.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

Keep reading...Show less
Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Green