Just because Trump wants to forget Paris doesn’t mean you have to
How to live your own “Green New Deal” in America, when it comes to your automotive choices.
Paris is not something I ever want to forget. I’ve watched the Eiffel sparkle with my wife, our bellies full of fromage, charcuterie, and champagne. I’ve savored delicate morsels of Michelin-worthy cuisine, appreciated the fine arts, retraced Amelie’s steps in Montmartre, danced into the wee hours in the Pigalle, gawked at the chic auto showrooms on the Champs Elysees. But here we are, just days into Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House, and the man has the gall (pun intended) to put gorgeous, awe-inspiring, mouth-watering Paris in his proverbial rear-view.
Of course, we’re talking about the Paris Agreement, the one designed to stave off irreparable climate change and global crisis. How gauche, Donald!
As expected, Trump issued an executive order announcing the United States’ intent to withdraw from the historic 2015 climate pact, something he also did in his first term; Joe Biden reversed Trump’s decision early in his own presidency. We’ll join Libya, Iran, and Yemen as the only nations outside the Paris framework. Even worse: Who knows what other countries might be emboldened by Trump’s nationalistic approach to energy and join suit?
(Relatedly, Trump signed another executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy,” in which he vowed “to eliminate the ‘electric vehicle (EV) mandate’” by taking a hatchet to any subsidies that give EVs any unfair advantage over their internal combustion counterparts. As I outlined, the EV tax credits will take congressional approval to rework, so, for now, it appears the incentives for buying or leasing EVs remain — but the clock is ticking. More on that soon!)
If you’re someone who cares personally about climate change, or, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, would like the air that our children breathe to be less polluted, it surely feels frustrating and disenfranchising to watch as your country’s leaders make sweeping changes that take our approach to global warming backwards. But the only way to fix that is at the ballot box, so, yeah, get on that next time.
In my own angst, I thought about the rhetoric that got us here — not from the fossil fuel lobbyists but regular folks and car content creators who shouted about personal choice. “It’s a free country!” they ranted. “If I love a bored-out Ram Hemi pickup with dual straight-piped 8-inch exhausts spewing, then by God I should damn well be able to drive one!”
I realized that, just like the choice to drive a fire-breathing gas-guzzler, the choice to be environmentally conscious has always been a personal one. There were vegans long before you could routinely find vegan options on restaurant menus, and composting before municipalities offered official composting bins. There were folks choosing biking, walking, and public transport over solo commutes in cars. And celebs were notoriously choosing an early Toyota Prius when they could easily afford any opulent but inefficient Range Rover or Mercedes.
So just like your local Le Pain Quotidien, let’s attempt to bring a little taste of Paris to existence here in our Trump-era America. What might it take for us to live up to the Paris Agreement when it comes to our car buying choices and driving behaviors?
It would be nice if the authors of the agreement spelled things out more explicitly, but, instead they encouraged individual nations to concoct their own Nationally Determined Contributions to reach two agreed-upon metrics:
Limiting global warming to well below 2°C, with efforts to cap it at 1.5°C.
Achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the second half of the 21st century.
Until Monday, the United States was working towards those two goals by committing to a 50–52% reduction in overall GHG emissions by 2030, and that’s across our energy infrastructure, transportation, and agriculture. Based on EPA estimates, the 242 million or so light duty vehicles on American roads make up about 16% of our total GHG emissions. So the challenge becomes chopping that in half.
“Half” is an easy concept to grasp. You could drive half as often. Or half as far. You could split driving and public transportation 50/50. You could walk half of the time. Or bike. Or carpool instead of driving alone.
But those solutions work best for folks who live in places where public transit is abundant or where distances are short. In much of America, we still need cars. The answer to reach “half” in this case is “hybrid.” To an extent, I think we’ve been approaching environmentally-conscious incentives for electrified driving all wrong: we should be incentivizing folks to get into plain old hybrids – not even the plug-in variety – especially at lower price points and in the used car market.
And we should be targeting these incentives towards our lowest income drivers, people who depend on their cars to get to work, people who are living paycheck to paycheck. Regular hybrids are cheaper to make, require tiny batteries in comparison to EVs, and still depend on gas, appeasing many influential voices in today’s political scene.
Let’s take a Ford Maverick Hybrid – that’s the Blue Oval’s small pickup truck, perfect to double as a work truck and family hauler – and offer incentives off the base $27,949 sticker price. The hybrid version gets 37 MPG (with many reviews finding even better efficiency in testing), so that’s at least a 33% savings in GHG emissions AND an annual savings of around $600/year at the pump. It would instantly be one of the best deals in America. Yes, it’s only a reduction in emissions by one-third, but why should we apply the same burden to every single American? Maybe those who can afford to do more…should? Novel concept!
In the middle, we have plug-in hybrids. I’ve been meaning to dedicate a whole post to PHEVs, but the TL;DR is that I’m not a huge fan, namely because, by trying to be both an EV and a combustion vehicle, they excel at being neither and often cost substantially more. Take the Toyota RAV4, one of America’s most popular vehicles: its regular hybrid version costs just $1,000 more than the gas-only, but the plug-in “Prime” variant adds a whopping $13,000 to the base price. Still, some folks adore PHEV life — and you might too, if you want to pay the premium. One good reason: the plug-in RAV4 produces about 60% fewer GHGs than the standard model, and 45% fewer than the regular hybrid. You’d also save about $300 more in fuel costs per year over the standard hybrid (per this one report, anyway), so while that won’t make up the difference in vehicle cost, it’s something.
Lastly, of course, we have EVs. Here, the math is pretty simple. An EV produces zero emissions at the tailpipe, and even taking into account the emissions produced in the manufacturing process for an EV — which, admittedly, are often greater than those created while making a standard combustion car — and America’s not-so-clean energy mix, an EV’s annual GHG emissions are at least 62% less than a gas car. Yes, that’s decidedly more than half. And while an cheap, incentivized leases have recently made EVs more accessible, for sure, their actual sticker prices routinely soar into the $60,000 range and beyond, keeping them out of reach for many buyers.
But that’s okay — back in the 1990s, when it debuted, the Prius was a luxury item, costing almost double the price of a similarly-sized Toyota Corolla. Those who had the means and desire to do more for the planet took it upon themselves to pay the premium. The same is true today. Not everyone will choose to spend the money on a Rivian R1T over a loaded Ford King Ranch, but we can applaud those who make the green choice and hopefully influence more folks in their respective communities.
In other words, in a world of Donalds, be a Diaz:
