Earlier this week, we reported that two Democratic U.S. Senators from California – Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein – had recently sent a letter to President Joe Biden asking him to consider following the state’s lead by supporting legislation that would result in an ICE vehicle ban by the year 2035, a timeline that a number of countries and two U.S. states – California and Massachusetts – have already committed to. However, it doesn’t appear that Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, is terribly keen on the idea.
At a recent U.S. House hearing, Buttigieg said that he was unaware of any support for an ICE vehicle ban by 2035 from the Biden administration and said that he has “not heard of anything to that effect at the national or federal level.” Buttigieg also noted that several automakers, including General Motors, have already committed to transitioning to electric power on their own accord. “I’ve not heard of that in a mandatory context but that certainly seems to be where the U.S. auto industry is headed,” Buttigieg said.
Biden has thus far declined to endorse a plan to end ICE-powered vehicle sales by 2035 and also hasn’t yet established new emissions standards. Padilla and Feinstein’s letter also urged the President to adopt California’s compromise emissions deal that it reached with a number of automakers, including Ford, an agreement that the automaker has since urged its peers to back as well.
To date, Biden has not discussed a specific date for the U.S. to end ICE-powered vehicle sales but has taken several actions to address climate control since taking office. That includes replacing the entire 650,000 vehicle government fleet with EVs, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, appointing a new head of the EPA, and starting discussions with automakers about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, Ford recently announced that its entire passenger vehicle range in Europe would consist of electric vehicles by 2030 and that it would be investing at least $22 billion globally in electrification through 2025, nearly twice the company’s previous EV investment plans.
We’ll have more on the future of electric and ICE-powered vehicles very soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for non-stop Ford news coverage.
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While Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada — even Russia, and Saudi Arabia — are busy laying out plans for hydrogen, the folks at our Department of Energy are paralyzed trying to figure out which will come first — the hydrogen infrastructure or the hydrogen industry itself that will need to use it. Meanwhile, our oil companies, as well as our car companies, have buried their heads in the sand. Oil companies want to drill for more oil when demand for it is diminishing and car companies want to make battery cars when we have no grid capacity to charge them. And we are frantically searching for the ideal battery, ignoring the fact that even if we find it, it will still need to be charged through our anemic grid.
If hydrogen is indeed our only effective means to fight climate change at scale, then we should start with the hydrogen infrastructure itself. Why make it a two-step solution (battery-hydrogen) when we can go directly to hydrogen and get there faster? Even our present two-step solution will need hydrogen. That is correct, the proponents of battery cars that have been busy ridiculing hydrogen will need it themselves to power hydrogen generators to charge their battery cars. And of course, we will need to deliver hydrogen to our factories to make steel, cement, and fertilizer — and to power our airplanes before it becomes unpopular to fly with jet fuel.
But how would we be able to deliver all this hydrogen across our vast land? The same way we deliver natural gas — with pipelines. Indeed, we can even use our existing gas pipelines if we simply reline them with plastic inserts, as they are doing now in the UK — or as we are doing here when steel pipes start leaking. And as far as setting up the hydrogen infrastructure is concerned; we should stop conflating the source of the hydrogen with the means of delivering it. One has nothing to do with the other. Arguments against the source of hydrogen should not get in the way of us setting up a safe and efficient way to deliver it to those that need it.