Today, Explained - It’s electric!

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Norway has lapped the world in adopting electric vehicles. Vox’s Umair Irfan explains how the US might catch up. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Dragon SpaceX. go for launch. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. In a world with many problems, one problem reigns supreme. The climate emergency. The stakes have never been higher. The odds of bipartisan agreement on this issue have possibly never been lower. But there's a new president in town, and he's hot for science. We've already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis.

We can't wait any longer. It's Earth Week at Today Explained. We're going to talk about what's in store for this planet. The future of our future. Welcome to Earth. Week on Today Explained. Welcome back to Earth Week on Today Explained. On the show yesterday, you heard from writer David Wallace-Wells about the climate crisis and why, in spite of all the long odds, he's feeling hopeful. And one of the hopeful items he pointed to was that increasingly people don't want to see their cars powered by dirty energy.

President Joe Biden is trying to push the United States far forward on this front. That two trillion dollar infrastructure plan we talked about a few weeks ago, among all the money Biden wants to spend rebuilding our transportation system, electric cars and their infrastructure are the biggest single item. And it's high time because we have fallen way, way behind. Norway. If you don't know Norway, it's next to Sweden, which is next to Finland. It's famous for its fjords, but also its Nobel Prizes, the longest tunnel on earth, a little town called Hell, that ginger guy in Game of Thrones who wants to kill Jon Snow, but then they become BFFs.

He's Norwegian, and so is the band A-ha. A-ha? A-ha! A-ha! A-ha! A-ha! A-ha! It's gotta be one of the biggest fossil fuel producers in the world.

But in recent years, they've been using their fossil fuel funds to finance a small electric car revolution. You might have noticed if you watched this year's Super Bowl. Will Ferrell is very upset about it. Did you know that Norway sells way more electric cars per capita than the U.S.? Norway. Well, I won't stand for it. Come on. We wanted to find out how Norway got to be number one. So we reached out to Kristina Boo.

And I'm the secretary general of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association. We were all like, why should Norway be at the forefront? It doesn't really make sense. And she was all, why should Norway be at the forefront? It doesn't really make sense. We're a small country with 5.3 million people, but it's quite large. Lots of mountains, cold climate, freezing winters. And even in the very north of Norway, they buy electric cars.

My point is, if Norway can do this, any country can do it, and definitely US. So how did Norway do it? Partly a bit by luck, but of course, environmental reasons has been very important. And for Norway, we already have a clean grid. All our electricity is renewable. All of it? Yeah, pretty much 100%. It's hydropower, mostly, and some wind and some solar, but mostly hydropower.

So yeah, for us to reduce our CO2 emissions, we have to tackle transport to be able to reduce emissions. They started putting in policies to help this early 1990s already. Something that a lot of people don't know is that we don't subsidize electric cars. What we do is we tax ICE cars or internal combustion engine cars heavily. And we've done that for years in Norway. And they decided to remove the taxes for full electric cars, which was very important because in most other countries,

buying a new electric car is a lot more expensive than buying one that pollutes. In the US, for example, you have to pay up a lot more because they're still a lot more expensive to produce. In Norway, however, they're more or less the same price. By the time the governments waive the whopping 25% sales tax and the road registration fee, the sticker price for electric cars can actually be less than their gas or diesel equivalents. There were quite a few incentives put in place as well. In the beginning, something that was very important was access to the bus lane. And also lower tolls on roads

and also free public parking. Wow, free public parking if you drive an electric car? Yeah, that was something that started making people think. But there were not really any cars to buy. But then slowly, new car models were launched and something started really happening around 2010, 11, 12. The Nissan Leaf was launched 2011. And then the Tesla came.

You may have read that sometimes we get some criticism that maybe our car doesn't work in the cold. And this is not true. I tried telling people, hey, you know where our number one per capita sales are? Norway. Norway is not a. I tried telling people, hey, you know where our number one per capita sales are? Norway. Norway is not a hot place. Okay. And then suddenly something started.

So back in 2012, the market share, new car sales were 3%. It's higher than the US today. And even at that time, people around the world were starting to say, hey, what's going on up there? With his new electric hearse, this Norwegian undertaker now offers an eco-friendly ride to the ever after. Oddborger Jolstad has seen a rise in demand for the service,

a sign of the growing popularity of battery-powered vehicles in the Nordic nation. And then last year, it ended at 54.3%. So more than half of new car sales last year in Norway were fully electric cars. Then today, this is becoming the new normal. How normal is it? How many people drive electric cars? Okay, so it takes a long time to sort of change the whole vehicle fleet because we keep our cars for a long time here. And because they're so expensive, we have high taxes on cars. But nationally, about 12% of all passenger cars are fully electric today. But looking at a city like Volkswagen. Innovationer du har bruk for. A milestone. Because it's been possible to buy since 2011. Tesla, you know, that car, I guess.

It's a very common car as well. But there's a wide variety today. The last few years, it's been more and more different models that have been available. So there's all kinds of cars, smaller, bigger SUVs. But the Nissan Leaf is the one that you will see the most. I mean, it sounds like price was a big driver in Norway, pun fully intended. But what is going on with all the other infrastructure you need, like charging? Does Norway provide superior infrastructure than its peer nations?

No, not at all. It's still not good enough, the infrastructure that is available, but it's getting better and better. And you always get this chicken and egg problem with whether the chargers should come first or the cars should come first. Well, at least in Norway, we started with the cars. I started working at this association in 2014. And I remember my parents live about an hour south of Oslo.

But with the EV we had at the office, I couldn't drive and visit my parents even. It didn't work because the range wasn't good enough and there were no charging stations on that stretch. So today we have 10 different companies running charging stations, fast charging stations, and a lot is being invested in this area. And I think that is an important message

to other countries too, that if you help the car sales to grow, then the charging infrastructure will follow pretty quickly. Yeah, I gotta say, I mean, Norway's number one, rah, rah, rah, but you're only at 12% electric, which is not that big a number. Do you feel like there's been a cultural shift yet? Or might that still be somewhere down the road? Yes, we've sort of had a collective mind shift happening over the last five years.

Then you see people that loved gas guzzlers now buying cool EVs and they, okay, they miss the sound a bit, but in change, they get a car that is really quick, really fun to drive. You know, people are just suddenly finding this cool. You're saying at this point that people who don't even care about the climate or the environment are buying electric cars just because it feels like the best car to buy. Exactly. And they wouldn't pay extra. I mean, you have to be very, very green or very, very environmentally friendly to pay up thousands of dollars extra for a car that you're even a bit unsure of when it comes to the technology. And this is where the politicians come into the game. They need to make it possible for us as consumers to make the right choice.

And then you got to get Norwegian Will Ferrell to do a commercial for you. Do you have a Norwegian Will Ferrell? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I'm not sure who's the most famous. AHA maybe. Do the guys from A-ha drive electric cars? Yeah, they did back in the 1990s.

The lead singer of A-ha, Morten, he drove an electric car across the tolls, you know, coming into Oslo together with an environmental organization here called Bellona. You have to pay when you go into Oslo. Yeah. And we refused. when you go into Oslo. Yeah. And we refused. And then you get a fine. And if you don't pay the fine, they come and confiscate the car.

And they were saying, we shouldn't pay these road taxes because we drive an EV. And they continued doing that again and again and until the car was actually confiscated, I think. But in the end, this was actually law. They decided that EVs shouldn't pay road taxes. Oh, so not only is the guy from AHA an electric vehicle driver,

but he's like an electric vehicle activist. Absolutely, he was. And part of the reason why we got this incentive in place was because of him. Wow. Yeah. Well, there you go. Take that, Will Ferrell. I'll see you next time. comes from ramp ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control

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The United States is not even within striking distance. In the United States, about 2% of new cars run on electricity, but in Norway, about half of new cars are electric vehicles. Now, California does have a larger number overall of electric vehicles, but it's a small fraction of the total number of vehicles sold in that state, and certainly much smaller than the total number of cars and trucks being sold in the U.S. So we actually do buy more electric vehicles than Norway, just not doing it on that per capita basis. Yeah, that's right.

It's a tiny sliver of the overall automobile market here in the country. What's Joe Biden want to do about that? Joe Biden wants to step on the gas pedal for evs in the u.s nice joe biden himself is a car guy he has a 1967 corvette that he loves to talk about i love this car nothing but incredible memories every time i get i think of my dad and beau god can my dad drive a car and so he took a huge step towards this electrification in his infrastructure package that he introduced. The largest share of that package goes towards transportation, and a big chunk of that is towards electrifying vehicles in the U.S. How much money are we talking about for EVs?

We're talking about $174 billion across all the various programs that he has chalked out in this program. There are three main prongs to it. The first is building out a national EV charger network to help cure people of range anxiety. Range anxiety, pardon me. The next big thing is using the federal government's purchasing power. The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which we're going to replace with clean electric vehicles made right here in America by American workers, creating millions of jobs, a million

autoworker jobs. The government itself owns a ton of cars. We're talking almost half a million or more. And by buying electric, they can sway the market. And the third big thing that the Biden administration wants to do is create incentives, basically sweeten the pot for car buyers by making new electric vehicles cheaper through tax incentives, grants, and other programs. All right, let's talk about all of the things. Let's start with range anxiety. Sure. Well, one of the main concerns for EVs is that there aren't always a lot of places to charge them. The first generation of electric vehicles didn't have that greater range, about 30 to 70 miles. These days, electric vehicles can

easily top into the 100, 200, 300 mile range. But that still means that once you run out of juice, you have to find a place to charge up, and that can take a while. And so what the Biden administration wants to do is help alleviate some of that concern by making sure that there's EV chargers all over the country. So you could be able to potentially take a coast to coast trip just running on electrons. And so the target here is about 500,000 EV chargers over the next 10 years. Okay, so that's that. The other thing here, which is another huge hurdle, is subsidies. Because presently, electric cars in this country still cost a heck of a lot more than, I don't know, a Honda Civic, right? Yeah, there's definitely a premium for electric vehicles. And some of the most famous EVs,

you know, the Teslas, tend to be luxury cars or at the top end of the market. And for people who are deciding on a price budget, they really have fewer options for electrification and for clean vehicles. And so the idea is that the government can offer some kinds of incentives, some tax breaks to help shave that cost off and make electric vehicles more competitive with their gasoline powered counterparts. And this is something that seems to have worked in Norway. Would this make EVs a more economical choice for, like, the middle class in America? It would go towards that, certainly. But the other side of Norway is that they're also disincentivizing gasoline-powered cars.

You know, fuel costs are much more expensive in Norway, and they tax gasoline a little bit more aggressively. In the U.S., the gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, and it was last raised in 1993, and it was not even adjusted for inflation. So in the U.S., we're very loathe to actually provide a disincentive towards using gasoline cars, and so it's kind of hard to have both the carrot and the stick here. Whereas in the U.S., we like to use the carrots. We like to use the incentives to try to encourage people to move. In Norway, they do both. Let's talk about this final item on Biden's list, which is electrifying the federal government's fleet of cars. Which cars are we talking about? Like USPS mail vans? Well, those are a separate allocation, but the federal government themselves, I mean, you've seen probably around D.C. all these government license plates on minivans, on cars and sedans. Those are all federal motor pool vehicles, and if you add them up across the country, that adds up to about 650,000 vehicles.

That's a huge market on its own. And so the federal government says that if we tell all of our suppliers, all of our vendors that we want electric vehicles, we create a huge incentive throughout the entire market for them to start developing these vehicles. And as we buy them, as the federal government uses its purchasing power, it helps them reach an economy of scale and helps lower the cost across the whole market. Now, the U.S. Postal Service also has a fleet, and recently they signed a contract for the next generation of their postal delivery trucks for about 165,000 vehicles. I saw those new ones. They're kind of cute. Yeah. Look how odd it looks. They've been getting tweets similar to like, what in the Pixar is this? It does look like a cartoon truck from a child's movie. That is

funny looking. It's that huge windshield. It's like a big head. Yeah, they're the goofy looking trucks. But there was some criticism among Democrats because they weren't all committed to be EVs. And now there are some lawmakers that want to actually pause that and reopen the contract to add the stipulation that those should be electric vehicles. The other big target for the electrification is school buses. This is not a federal vehicle, but the federal government wants to electrify 20 percent of the U.S.'s 500,000 school buses. You know, Vice President Kamala Harris was touring an electric school bus plant just this week. I do want to just point out to you while we're standing here talking, all six of these buses have been on. And they are on.

It's on right now? They're idling right now. Isn't that something? You heard that? It's on right now. And that would go a long way towards not just electrification, but also reducing exposure to children of air pollution. You know, a lot of these buses run on diesel, which can produce a lot of harmful particulates. And so this might be a good way of helping make communities healthier. You mentioned pushback from the Democrats on the USPS mail vans not being electric. What about pushback from Republicans who maybe don't like this push towards EVs?

Any of that? Or is it getting some bipartisan love? I mean, it's really hard to argue against EVs on their merits because, I mean, they are cleaner, they're high tech. And with Biden's infrastructure push, he wants to ensure that they're made here in the USA. I think there's standard Republican criticism that the government shouldn't interfere in the market, that they shouldn't be putting their fingers on the scale to try to tip the balance towards EVs and let them compete on their own. But it's hard to argue against some of these cars that are, you know, made here in the USA, and that people who do buy EVs generally tend to like them.

And the auto industry is down. That must help the cause, yeah? I mean, it certainly seems like it. You've heard commitments from, like, General Motors, which says that they anticipate their entire fleet to become electric. And you heard, you know, Volkswagen, for instance, joking that they're going to change their name to Volkswagen. And they're saying that they expect all of their, about half of their cars to be electric in sales by about 2030. And how much of a difference would this make in the United States? I mean, that's the hard thing to tell because it's one thing to make electric vehicles and to try to make them cheap, but it's another thing for people to actually buy them. And people currently have cars right now. And so not only do

we need to get people to buy new EVs, we also want to try to get some of the oldest and dirtiest cars off the road as well. And right now, there isn't really a program in place to do that. And we've seen this push for EVs before. There have know, whenever gas prices spike, auto companies talking about more fuel efficient vehicles. But lately, US automakers have been pushing bigger and bigger cars. You've seen SUVs and these crossover utility vehicles. And even when they're talking about EVs, they were talking about electrifying these bigger cars. Like there's now even going to be an electric Hummer that's coming to the market pretty soon. I saw the commercial. It does this crab walk thing where the tires all go diagonal. With crab walk, Hummer EV has the ability to drive diagonally,

something no pickup or SUV in the industry can match. Well, I mean, with electric motors, you have a lot more flexibility with the platform and it lets you do all sorts of interesting things with it. But again, you know, US automakers historically have been really resistant to these new technologies. Like Ford said recently that they're going to get out of the making sedans altogether, aside from the Ford Mustang. Basically they're seeding that market to foreign automakers. And so they see that the future is going to be in bigger and bigger cars, but they're also saying that they want them to be more fuel efficient and eventually electric. And it seems like that's kind of making those goals much more difficult than they need to be.

Hmm. I mean, what potential difference does this make environmentally in the United States? Well, transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And cars and light-duty trucks are about 60% of the transportation footprint. So cars and light-duty trucks are about 17% of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. If you could electrify even a small fraction of that, you'd take a big bite out of greenhouse gases here in the U.S. But that's only one step towards that. We could get bigger changes and more radical changes if we were to rethink infrastructure more generally, things like how we build our cities, highways, and roads. But that's much more expensive and requires much

longer-term thinking than we're seeing right now. Christina told us in the first half of the show that these EVs in Norway are almost entirely running off of renewable power, mostly hydro, she said. What's the situation in the United States? Let's talk about all these EVs in California. What kind of power are they actually running on? That's a great point. An electric vehicle is only as green as the electricity that powers it. And the US still has a power grid that's dominated by fossil fuels. Now, the emissions, the carbon footprint from the US power grid has actually decreased, but there's still a fair amount of fossil fuels on the grid. And while renewable energy like wind and solar are rapidly rising, and in many markets,

they're actually cheaper than fossil fuels, there's still a small sliver of the overall energy picture. So in order to make EVs reach their full potential, we also need to clean up the power grid, the electricity supply as well. What are the concerns that arise environmentally and otherwise when you have one of the biggest car markets in the world make this huge jump towards EVs? I mean, let's talk about the materials needed to make these cars. Are there an infinite number of lithium batteries out there in the world for this U.S. market that is car-hungry. That's an important factor to consider. You know, lithium is a material that has to be mined, and the supplies of that can get

very limited if there is a huge surge in demand for lithium-ion batteries. And certainly the materials cost for building this whole fleet of new cars has an environmental footprint. Some estimates do show that EVs do have a larger upfront environmental footprint than a conventional gasoline-powered car, but over the course of the life of the vehicle, they actually are a net benefit to the environment because they burn fewer greenhouse gas emissions. But it's a delicate balance, and the more delicate balance will be then convincing people from using their existing cars to switch to new EVs, and that's where the calculation gets a little bit more difficult.

Does it make more sense to get more mileage out of your current car or to invest in a brand new electric vehicle? This is not going to be a completely seamless transition. And there are some environmental impacts that we have to address at the same time. But on balance, they are likely to be an improvement over our current vehicle fleet. And that's why it's important to move in that direction. There's certainly some sort of, you know, still some resistance to electric vehicles. People do like the rumble of a gasoline engine and people like big pickup trucks.

But really, if you can make an electric vehicle cheaper, then that argument really makes itself. It's hard to argue with something that's cleaner and cheaper. So once you can hit both of those points at the same time, I think that's really where you'll see an inflection. That's a wrap on EVs. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about energy, namely nuclear energy, and why some argue if you want to get serious about reducing carbon emissions, you gotta get down with nuclear. It's Earth Week on Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Earth Week, Bye.