‘There Is No Mandate’: Sheldon Whitehouse Clarifies US Policies Around Electric Vehicles

4 months ago

During a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about electric vehicles.

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Transcript

00:00with a couple of clarifications. First of all the word mandate has come up

00:07repeatedly during this hearing and I just want to make sure everybody

00:10understands there is no mandate. What there is is a tax incentive and for

00:15those of us who believe in traditional economic policy what the tax incentive

00:21is there to do is to offset the negative externality of all of the pollution that

00:28comes out of an internal combustion engine that society at large pays for

00:33but it's not baked into the price of the vehicle and you can go all the way to

00:37Milton Friedman to get the economic theory that supports that. Second EVs

00:44have been more expensive than internal combustion engines largely because of a

00:50market decision by the electronic vehicle innovators to come in at the

00:55high end of the market because Tesla for instance could compete with Maserati

01:01and Lamborghini on performance and so of course they came in at the high end of

01:08the market particularly when you're starting with small initial

01:11manufacturing runs but as the market has grown costs are now coming down to

01:18where it's maybe a thousand two thousand dollars difference between the average

01:21EV cost and the average internal combustion engine cost just around

01:25$50,000 in each case. There are available electronic vehicles that are

01:36less expensive than the average internal combustion engine now so depending on

01:41what you want to choose if you want to go and compete with Maseratis you can go

01:44to the high end but they're also cheaper than average internal combustion

01:50electric vehicle options and the last thing I'll point out is that while tire

01:59emissions are obviously real and tire emissions are greater from an electric

02:06vehicle than internal combustion vehicle because the electric vehicle is a

02:10heavier because of the battery and be higher performance because it's higher

02:14performance so you have more tire wear and that creates some additional measure

02:19of tire wear related pollution. To complain about that in the context of

02:27tailpipe pollution and tailpipe emissions calls to mind the old

02:32biblical verse about the moat in your own eye or the moat in your brother's

02:39eye compared to the beam in your own eye. The beam here is tailpipe emissions

02:47which pollute enormously and create massive climate risk and I agree that

02:54tire emissions need to be dealt with but if you put them to scale and compare

02:59their hazard for humankind and for local health there it's moat versus beam. So

03:06with that let me say the questions for the record are due by noon tomorrow with

03:10signed hard copies delivered to the committee clerk in Dirksen 624 in

03:15particular Ms. Gross and Dr. Jenkins if you could even perhaps coordinate on

03:21recommendations for us in that beak shaving space however you want to do it

03:25is fine but I'd love to get those in and we ask that our witnesses respond to

03:30those questions within seven days of receipt so that would be within a week

03:33if you guys could do that. With no further business for the committee the

03:36vote on the floor has already begun and our hearing is adjourned. Thank you.

03:44you

‘There Is No Mandate’: Sheldon Whitehouse Clarifies US Policies Around Electric Vehicles

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