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Letter: Electric Vehicles Won’t Save the Climate

The Wall Street Journal

April 26, 2023

Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 24, 2023, in response to the Journal’s April 19, 2023, op-ed titled “Biden and Media Are EV Grifters.”

Electric vehicles are preposterous, in particular as climate policy (“Biden and Media Are EV Grifters” by Holman Jenkins, Jr., Business World, April 19). The Environmental Protection Agency’s own climate model predicts that the proposed emissions standards for light, medium and heavy vehicles would reduce global temperatures in 2100 by 0.02-degrees Celsius.

Mr. Jenkins goes on to offer the Econ 101 argument for a carbon tax. This ignores the incentives of Congress when climate policy becomes a money machine and a host of other problems, among which is, again, the near-zero future temperature effect of any carbon tax that Congress might enact. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues that the carbon tax needed to achieve the purported 1.5-degree Celsius “safe” limit would have to be $35 per gallon of gasoline by 2030, in 2022 dollars, and rising sharply thereafter. No Congress will enact such a policy.

Read the full letter to the editor on the Wall Street Journal.