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Why Biden is buying 6,45,000 new cars
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- US Government Fleet: The U.S. federal government owns 6,45,047 motor vehicles, according to most recent report. This fleet is, for the most part, a menagerie of trucks: construction vehicles, Ford F-150s, armored vans that sit next to NASA launchpads so astronauts can quickly flee in case of an emergency. Many of those trucks—about a third of the federal fleet—are the white, cube-like U.S. Postal Service vans. Another third are passenger cars. The government owns a lot of vehicles.
- Biden's action plan: Since he took office in Jan 2021, President Joe Biden has recommitted the United States to the Paris Agreement and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. His most interesting climate actions so far haven’t taken the form of executive orders or really appeared in writing at all. Yet they offer a clearer view of Biden’s approach to climate change—and its aspiration to reshape the American economy—than anything we’ve seen so far. His plan for the federal fleet, in particular, encapsulates Biden-era climate policy in its ambition and limits. He debuted the initiative yesterday while signing an executive order pledging that the government would buy more American-made goods.
- Clean Electric Vehicles: The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which will now be replaced with clean electric vehicles made right here in America, by American workers. This initiative will create 1 million electric-automaking jobs, it is claimed. (That’s a big goal: At the end of last year, about 9,30,000 Americans worked in automaking, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.)
- Is this a sensible decision? By going electric, Biden’s government is making the same choice that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already made. Electric vehicles have cheaper fuel costs, and lower lifetime-maintenance costs, than gas vehicles, according to AAA. The government will spend less over time to run an electric fleet. Yet this type of policy isn’t meant to reflect the present-day market so much as influence the country’s future political economy. It rewards two of Biden’s strategic constituencies: unions in the Upper Midwest and young climate advocates. It is practicable: Democrats can accomplish it using only their narrow congressional majorities and Biden’s authority as chief of the executive branch.
- Various Questions: Will Biden replace federal gas-burning vehicles earlier than otherwise planned? Will the changeover take four years or 14? These details will shape how much electric automakers notice and benefit from the policy. Only about 1.6 million plug-in electric vehicles have been sold in the U.S. ever; in 2019, for instance, fewer than a quarter million EVs were sold. If Biden were to replace, say, the entire federal fleet over five years, the government would buy about 129,000 new cars every year—a huge total, equivalent to about a quarter of Tesla’s worldwide production last year. But if the fleet isn’t fully replaced until 2035, the policy will make a much smaller dent.
- Not too big really: It is limited in other ways. The federal fleet, although it is truly enormous, pales in comparison with the American private fleet. In 2019, the federal fleet consumed the equivalent of 386 million gallons of gasoline, emitting about 3.4 million tons of carbon dioxide. But the country as a whole used 142 billion gallons of gasoline that year. The federal fleet was responsible for about a 20th of 1 percent of U.S. carbon emissions in 2019. Every ounce of carbon reduction matters, but this policy will succeed or fail based on whether it accelerates electric-car adoption nationwide—not on whether it has a noticeable effect on American carbon emissions.
- Action is needed indeed: It is clear that climate change is real and dealing with it will require federal action. Many senior Trump officials were foggy on the first axiom and hostile to the second. Their policy reflected it. Biden is trickier: His administration seems intent on actually doing things. It has already outpaced Donald Trump’s standard. So what new standard should it meet? The goal of international climate policy might be atmospheric stabilization, but that exceeds the ambit of any one country or president.
- The grand goal: The lodestar is net zero by 2050, which Biden has laid out as a national goal. According to a recent landmark study from the ZERO Lab at Princeton, meeting that goal in the U.S. would require, by 2030, closing virtually all coal plants, expanding the power grid by 60 percent, and making sure that at least half of all new cars sold are EVs. That 2030 goal is close enough in time for us to have a sense of how much work remains to be done. And it shows why, for Biden’s federal-fleet plan to get results, it must happen quickly. Turning over the federal fleet by 2035, for instance, is not enough.
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