issued by the Biden administration have, by its own admission, put into place restrictions designed to force the proportion of electric vehicles to 50% of new sales by 2030. But it won’t work, and in any case, it’s an unworthy goal.
Although electric vehicles emit no greenhouse gases from a tailpipe, they are far from “clean.” The average gasoline passenger car2 metric tons per year while being driven 12,000 miles. The typical electric vehicle is driven less than half that, so it displaces about 1 ton of emissions per year.estimate them at 7-10 tons because China still heavily employs coal to power manufacturing.
Of course, electricity generation emissions should be expected to improve gradually from renewables and nuclear, and one could quarrel with some of the estimates. But the big picture is clear: EVs do little to reduce emissions., Jonathan Lesser and Mark Mills expose the near impossibility of upgrading the nation’s electrical infrastructure to support even a modest increment in the number of new electric vehicles.
We also doubt the feasibility of building enough on-the-road charging stations: the “Inflation Reduction Act” targets 4,000, compared to the existing 195,000 gas stations. These stations would require the power equivalent of a small city because demand is not spread evenly across the day and the physical space for enough stalls might be hard or impossible to acquire.