Vehicle mandate is a costly upper-class welfare program 

Vehicle mandate is a costly upper-class welfare program

• By: Kevin Lundberg and Timothy Benson
• Jul 20, 2018

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper recently signed an executive order committing Colorado to adopt California’s low-emissions vehicles standards. The executive order leaves open the possibility of also adopting the California Zero Emission Vehicle emissions standards, since much of the case for following the California model derives from the alleged benefits from ZEVs.

If the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission follows the governor’s directive and adopts the California vehicle emissions standards by an administrative rulemaking process at its Aug. 19 meeting, the state will require 15 percent of the automobiles sold in the state by 2025 to produce zero greenhouse gas emissions. Conventional internal-combustion-powered automobiles would also have their emissions cut by 50 percent over the same period.

The governor’s proposal is not a big blow to air pollution; it is instead a harsh blow to the Colorado economy and the state’s low-income families. Hickenlooper’s lawmaking-by-edict will, at best, provide very modest environmental benefits at an extraordinary cost to Colorado consumers and taxpayers.

The environmental benefits of “Zero Emission Vehicles” may be more elusive than real. A May study from the Manhattan Institute concludes that broad-based adoption of ZEVs would actually increase greenhouse gas emissions and other associated environmental costs. ZEVs are only as “green” as the electricity sources they plug into, and even by 2050, power sources for ZEVs won’t be “green” enough because the pollutants they emit will likely exceed emissions from new gasoline-powered vehicles.

According to the study, “Based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), increased reliance on ZEVs will increase overall emissions of sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulates, compared with the same number of new internal combustion vehicles, even after accounting for emissions from petroleum refineries.”

The study also concludes there is effectively no economic value of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions associated with ZEVs: “Although new ZEVs will reduce CO2 emissions compared with new internal combustion vehicles, the overall reduction will be less than 1% of total forecast energy-related U.S. CO2 emissions through 2050. That reduction will have no measurable impact on world climate and thus no economic value. Even if, by 2050, all internal combustion vehicles were replaced by ZEVs, the resulting reduction in CO2 emissions would be less than 500 million tons per year. This is less than half the estimated annual impact of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s now-moribund Clean Power Plan, which itself would have had no impact on world climate.”

The cost of federal and state subsidies for ZEVs and their charging infrastructure is also highlighted in the Manhattan Institute study. In the end, Manhattan concludes only mostly wealthy Golden State residents will benefit from the taxpayer subsidies.

A 2013 study from the University of California at Davis found 83 percent of California ZEV owners had household incomes exceeding $100,000, with 46 percent of them earning incomes above $150,000. The average Tesla owner was found to have a household income of $293,000. A more recent study by the Pacific Research Institute in Sacramento found 79 percent of electric vehicle plug-in tax credits were claimed by households with adjusted gross incomes greater than $100,000. Thus, by mandating ZEV sales, Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission would be essentially asking non-wealthy Coloradans to subsidize the purchase of fashionable vehicles for their rich neighbors — or, in other words, a welfare program for the upper middle class.

Air quality in Colorado and across the United States has been steadily improving. As of June, carbon dioxide emissions in the United States were at the lowest level recorded since 1992, and per-capita emissions are the lowest they’ve been since 1950.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2018 Greenhouse Gas Inventory, gross greenhouse gas emissions in the United States decreased by 2 percent from 2015 to 2016. In 2007, GHG emissions were 15.6 percent above 1990 levels; now, GHG emissions are just 2.6 percent above 1990 levels, 11.6 percent below 2005 levels. And air quality should continue to improve as new, cleaner automobiles replace older automobiles. Additionally, as some current national energy trends continue, such as the increased use of natural gas, GHG rates will likely decrease further.

What all this means is that the dubious and meager environmental gains to be achieved by adopting the stringent California emissions standards are far outweighed by the standards’ extraordinary cost. The Air Quality Control Commission should reject Hickenlooper’s expensive, regressive proposal.

Kevin Lundberg is a veteran Colorado state senator from Larimer County and former member of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee. Timothy Benson (tbenson@heartland.org) is a policy analyst with The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank based in Illinois.