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BIDEN’S ELECTRIC-CAR PLAN COULD SUFFER FROM OBAMA’S LACKLUSTER LEGACY: Former vice president Joe Biden has some scratching their heads over a climate plan he introduced last week during the Democratic debates to deploy 500,000 electric-car charging stations if elected president in 2020.
The “big question” for Biden is what he actually means, said Jeff Lenard, vice president for strategy at the National Association of Convenience Stores, a trade group representing a big chunk of the nation’s fueling stations.
“It would be pretty difficult to get to 500,000 locations, given that would be three times as many gas stations as there are in the country,” he said. There are only 150,000 gasoline refueling stations nationwide.
It would be more realistic if Biden meant 500,000 individual nozzles for plugging in a car, rather than stations that provide free public charging, he added.
Biden’s campaign didn’t give details on how the plan would actually work — whether it would mean subsidies, for example — after he announced it during Thursday night’s debate.
Obama’s track record: Biden’s electric-car plan already suffers from a lackluster track record going back to the billions of dollars spent by the Obama administration to drive electric-car deployments with charging stations.
The Energy Department says there are around 21,000 public electric-vehicle chargers nationwide. That’s despite Washington’s last attempt to invest $4.5 billion in electric-charging infrastructure while Biden was still vice president. President Barack Obama’s goal to have one million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015 also didn’t pan out.
Electric car sales in 2018 rose to around 360,000, marking an 81 percent increase from the previous year. The rise in sales brought the United States to one million vehicles on the road near the end of 2018, comprising around 1 percent of all vehicle sales, which continue to be dominated by cars powered by internal combustion engines.
What about ethanol and other alternative fuels?: It also raises the question whether other alternative-fuel vehicles should be considered in reaching Biden’s goal, such as those powered by higher blends of ethanol.
Biden needs to improve his appeal in Iowa, the largest ethanol producer in the country, after failing adequately to answer questions over Reuters reports that he called for cutting annual ethanol blending requirements while vice president to benefit oil refineries in his home state of Delaware.
Geoff Cooper, the president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, said last month on a call with reporters that the best thing Biden could do would be to visit an ethanol plant and be honest with farmers and the ethanol industry.
More ethanol cars than EVs: At the same time, the number of cars on the road that can run on 85-percent ethanol fuel blends, called flexible-fuel vehicles, has grown to 21 million, according to the Department of Energy.
The problem with the ethanol cars, produced primarily by Ford and GM, has been the lack of availability of E85 refueling stations outside the Midwest. But that is expected to change with the Environmental Protection Agency decision last month to allow year-round sales of 15-percent ethanol blends, repealing a previous restriction on the fuel due to its high Reid vapor pressure rating.
A number of fuel retailers, such as Sheetz and Kwik Trip, are already selling the fuel, which they blend on site from tanks full of 85-percent ethanol fuel, which a driver can also buy at the pump.
Sheetz has also worked with electric-carmaker Tesla to deploy charging stations at its gas stations and stores.
An online petition posted last week called on global automakers to embrace cars that can use higher ethanol fuel blends. Many Japanese automakers have resisted making cars that can use high blends of ethanol, favoring hybrids and electric cars instead.
Ethanol advocates who posted the petition want that to change. “We wish to support and promote the automakers that choose to produce quality cars and trucks that run on higher ethanol blends,” the petition reads.
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OPEC POISED TO CONTINUE OIL PRODUCTION CUTS FOR NINE MORE MONTHS: OPEC is expected to keep oil production cuts in place for another nine months in an effort to balance the market with demand and keep prices on the high side.
OPEC opened its session to discuss production cuts Monday morning at its 176th conference in Vienna, Austria.
“Over the past 30 months or so we have had significant success in bringing down inventory levels, returning relative balance to the market, and helping evolve a more sustainability stability, in the interests of producers, consumers, and the global economy,” said Manuel Salvador Quevedo Fernandez, president of the OPEC conference and Venezuela’s oil minister, in opening the meeting Monday.
Quevedo said there are a number of “uncertainties” facing the cartel as it launches into the meeting, including a bearish market and the potential for slumping demand, as well as the rise of U.S. oil production and exports.
U.S.-China trade negotiations and elevated geopolitical tensions, such as with Iran, will also be factored into the decisions made at the meeting, he noted.
Any decision OPEC makes at the meeting would be ratified Wednesday.
EX-FOX NEWS REPORTER AND A CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST TAKE ON DRUDGE: A climate change activist and a former Fox News Channel reporter are teaming up on a website designed to combat “disinformation” spread by right-leaning media, focusing especially on climate change.
Author and blogger Joe Romm and ex-Fox News politics reporter Carl Cameron launched FrontPageLive.com last week, a news aggregation website that the duo calls “the go-to liberal antidote” to the conservative aggregation site the Drudge Report.
Romm and Cameron’s project does not specifically focus on climate change. But the issue dominates the website, with a special section marked by the hashtag #ClimateCrisis dedicated to links to stories about it.
“Climate change is the clearest instance where President Trump and the right-wing disinformation machine promote the opposite of science,” said Romm, who served in the Clinton administration’s Energy Department. “History will judge it more harshly than anything else.”
Josh recently conducted a joint interview with Romm, known for his climate change blogging at ThinkProgress, and Cameron, who covered politics for Fox News over two decades before quitting after the 2016 presidential campaign.
Frustrated with Fox’s approach to climate change: Cameron was a news reporter who rarely covered climate change because “it wasn’t a high-priority issue” for Fox News. But he grew frustrated with the opinion side of Fox, which he said is filled with “climate deniers” seeking to question consensus on the issue. Cameron worries that impulse, shared by the Drudge Report, has become worse under Trump.
“The problem of misinformation and arguing that climate science is somehow partisan is really dangerous,” Cameron said. “Trump is one of the greatest purveyors of it we have seen since the advent of the media.”
Matt Drudge, the creator and editor of the Drudge Report, has a history of seeking to undermine opinion on climate change.
Drudge was criticized for suggesting the government may have lied about the danger of Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 to increase the public’s concern about climate change.
Read more of Josh’s report here.
U.S. REFUSES TO SIGN G20 STATEMENT ENDORSING ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE: The United States was the only Group of 20 member this weekend to refuse to endorse a joint statement vowing to take action combating climate change.
The Trump administration dissented from 18 countries and the European Union, which signed a final communiqué reiterating their commitment to implementing the goals of the Paris climate change accord. The result was expected, as Trump has rejected the international climate change pact, making America the only country in the world to do so.
“Signatories to the Paris Agreement who confirmed at Buenos Aires its irreversibility and are determined to implement it, reaffirm their commitment to its full implementation, reflecting common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances,” the joint statement said.
The statement includes a clause saying the United States “reiterates its decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because it disadvantages American workers and taxpayers.”
The Trump administration, according to reports, had tried to sway countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Australia, and Brazil also to refrain from endorsing climate change action but was unsuccessful.
U.S. MAYORS TO VOTE ON FIRST-EVER RESOLUTION SUPPORTING CARBON PRICING: Mayors gathering for their annual meeting Monday will vote on a resolution urging Congress to pass carbon pricing legislation.
It’s the first time the U.S. Conference of Mayors will vote on a carbon pricing resolution.
This year’s meeting, in Honolulu, Hawaii, includes more than 1,400 mayors representing cities with populations of 30,000 and larger.
The resolution says Congress should “pass legislation that imposes a price on carbon emissions sufficient enough to reduce emissions in line with ambitions detailed in the Paris Agreement.”
It notes that “economists are in general agreement that market-based mechanisms such as carbon pricing will create price signals” that encourage businesses to invest in carbon-free sources.
“A national price on carbon emissions legislation in the U.S. Congress is probably the most important thing Congress can do to help us with climate change,” said Jackie Biskupski, the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, in a statement posted to Twitter.
Biskupski introduced the resolution along with mayors Bill de Blasio of New York City, Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, and others.
“Not only is carbon pricing an effective, efficient way to reduce emissions, but it’s also becoming the consensus solution, as this vote shows,” Andres Jimenez, senior director of government affairs at Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which helped spearhead the resolution, told Josh. “The Conference of Mayors’ position makes it clear that carbon pricing should be an integral piece of America’s climate policy.”
Jimenez’ group helped with the introduction earlier this year of a bipartisan carbon tax bill in the U.S. House.
The Rundown
New York Times US oil companies find energy independence isn’t so profitable
Axios Exxon working to push trade group on climate change
Los Angeles Times California was warned about climate change 30 years ago. Now it’s feeling the effects
Calendar
MONDAY | July 1
Noon, 1400 16th Street NW. Resources for the Future launches the 2019 Global Energy Outlook: The Next Generation of Energy, the energy economics group’s annual review of global energy market projections by leading international energy organizations and corporations around the world.
THURSDAY | July 4
Independence Day.
