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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer's Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. Now, our climate story of the week. By now, many of you have heard that California will ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars and light duty trucks by the year 2035. Should the nation follow suit? What will this mean in terms of developing an electric car charging infrastructure and a hydrogen-powered car? That's another category infrastructure between now and then. Let's talk about it with Dan Gearino reporter covering clean energy in the Midwest for Inside Climate News. Dan, welcome to WNYC. Glad you can join us.

Dan Gearino: Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: The specific language in the law is that California will move to accelerate to 100% new zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035. How does the state define zero-emission vehicles and what types of vehicles would qualify?

Dan Gearino: It's funny in that the zero-emission vehicles under California law includes some vehicles with emissions. It includes all-electric vehicles. It includes fuel cell vehicles, but it also includes some gas-electric hybrids. Basically, a gas-electric hybrid needs to meet certain standards for having a battery big enough that most of the miles driven on it are going to be on electric power. For those that qualify, you could still have a car that runs partially on gasoline that could still be sold in 2035.

Brian Lehrer: Is California the only state so far to have done this?

Dan Gearino: No. California is, when you look at the policy, this is a really meaty policy. In a lot of ways, the 2035 goal is just one part of a much broader policy. Last year in New York passed a much shorter bill that basically said we have a 2035 goal, a similar top-line goal, but without any of the underlying details. I expect that New York will follow through in the future and backfill some of those details to be much more like the California law. Others--

Brian Lehrer: Because there's a difference, if I can stay on New York for a minute because we have a lot of listeners in New York and they may be confused by this, because the national reporting has generally been, "Oh, look what California has done. It's only California. New York, and other states are deciding whether to follow suit." Is New York's policy, not really a policy? Is it just a goal that New York has to get to zero new gasoline-powered car sales by 2035, but California has a law?

Dan Gearino: I would say, comparing the two, the New York law and what the California air resources board just did. What happened in California is for real. It's got interim goals. It's got all kinds of other supporting details. New York has basically said, "This is our long-term goal, which is far in the future." New York's bill was just a few hundred words, not that much detail. In writing about this, one of the challenges is, I have to list that New York has done this, but it's not super comparable other than this top line detail between the two is the same, but the California law has this full weight of all kinds of supporting provisions.

We don't have that in New York. In New York, it merely says that-- actually I have the bill right in front of me. That it shall be a goal, so they describe it as a goal, that you're going to have this 2035 ban on the sale of new gasoline vehicles. Then by 2045, there would be this broader ban on heavy-duty vehicles that run on gasoline. To even talk about that in the same breath as what California did, I feel like as a little misleading.

I say this looking at energy laws across the country, there are plenty of examples of energy laws where lawmakers pick some far-off goal and they say, "We're going to do that. By 2050, we're going to do X, Y, or Z." If there aren't interim goals, if there isn't a whole bunch of supporting structure in there, that just means every single legislature between now and that date can simply just say, "Nah, we changed our mind or we're going to undermine this goal." I would say we still need to see a lot more before I would say New York is in the same league as California in terms of its ambitions here.

Brian Lehrer: Does California have some interim steps along the way between now and 2035 that are hard posts in the way you just referred to?

Dan Gearino: Yes. This is one of those things, there's a kind of cheat sheet for helping just a member of the public to distinguish between a serious law and one that's more aspirational. The presence of interim goals, especially interim goals that are pretty soon, that's a really big clue that we're looking at a serious rule. In California's rule says that, I'm just looking at the rule right now. It says that zero emission vehicles must be 35% in new cars and trucks sold by 2026. That's really soon, 68% by 2030, and then 100% by 2035.

Now that 68% by 2030, that's going to be tough. That's a really ambitious goal, 2030 is not that far away. What that says to me is considering California's track record for doing stuff like this, for having rulemaking that is somewhat ambitious in terms of trying to reduce emissions, that indicates to me this is serious.

Brian Lehrer: Some listeners who are climate concerned might hear that and think, "Wait, 2030 isn't until eight years from now, can we go faster?" Why is it so difficult to build out this infrastructure?

Dan Gearino: It's in order to have an energy transition in the transportation sector, you need to change a whole bunch of things. If we're talking about a transition mainly to auto-electric vehicles, you need to have a charging infrastructure. You also need to have an infrastructure for producing batteries in the quantities that we're going to need. You're going to need to have automakers and auto retailers adapt to being able to sell these vehicles, because especially auto retailers are still very much in the mindset that they know gasoline vehicles, they're more comfortable selling gasoline vehicles.

We have a transformation on this scale to do it by let's just say 2030, because I think by 2030, we will have seen a major change. In a lot of ways, the change between 2030 and 2035. I think that the thing that's going to be really noticeable for all of us is going to happen before that. Yes, it's this kind of top to bottom thing. When you sit back and think about everything that needs to change, it is 2030 is not a ton of runway.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your calls on our climate story of the week on California's move to ban the sale of new gasoline-only powered cars by 2035. A law that may soon be on the books in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, lots of the states in the Northeast. Also, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, and a few more, we'll explain why these particular states in a minute, but you can react to the news or ask a question of our guest, Dan Gearino, reporter covering clean energy and the Midwest generally for the publication Inside Climate News, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLeher.

Besides electric cars, which is what we usually think of, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are included in the California list of zero-emission vehicles. What are those for people who are completely unfamiliar, and are there any cars of that type that are actually on the market currently?

Dan Gearino: It's funny, I've written about fuel cells a few times and there are several different kinds of fuel cell vehicles. I believe that under the California law, this would be using hydrogen to convert into electricity, so you're basically using an electric motor. I should say I have not looked closely at the definition in California laws. The larger reason for including fuel cell vehicles is there remains a subset within the auto industry that is trying to make hydrogen vehicles happen. I think there was more of a debate maybe five years ago, what the next step in this transportation transition is going to look like.

Is it going to be fuel cell vehicles? Is it going to be all electric vehicles? The auto makers, in particular, are placing the vast majority of their bets on all electric vehicles. There would have to be a pretty big change for us to see a variety of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the market in 2030. I don't expect that to happen. It certainly could happen but it's basically including it because it is a zero-emission vehicle, but it doesn't mean there's going to be a lot

Brian Lehrer: Tia, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tia.

Tia: Hey, Brian, longtime listener. This is a pleasure to be here. I'm calling from a company that's a Brooklyn startup. We're called itselectric, itselectric.us, and we're curbside EV charging for the millions of drivers who park their cars on the street. We're trying to find solutions for drivers to be able to convert to electric by seeing that infrastructure where they live.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad you brought this up, Tia-- Oh, go ahead, the way that we do it. Go ahead.

Tia: The way that we do this is that we install chargers, but instead of those chargers connecting to the main utilities below grade to those Con Ed utility connections, we instead connect to the spare capacity in an adjacent building. We basically are pulling energy from a building to power a curbside charger, and then to help incentivize adoption, we revenue share with that building.

Brian Lehrer: That is really interesting for many reasons. One of them, Tia, there was just an article in Crain's New York Business yesterday, about how the move toward electric vehicles is exacerbating inequality. That's just what we need in society, is another thing to exacerbate inequality. Right? The complaint was coming from Uber drivers and Lyft drivers saying Manhattan has all these charging stations now for the well-off people who own their Teslas and things like that.

Places in Queens and Brooklyn, where most of the Uber drivers and Lyft drivers live, especially Queens, don't have that EV charger infrastructure yet, but they're being required or encouraged to drive electric vehicles or they just want to. It's a source of inequality. Are you aware of that as a thing? It sounds like what you are describing with your startup, not that I'm endorsing your business, is could be one thing that addresses that.

Tia: Exactly. Not an endorsement, but we are absolutely here for what we call EV equality. EVs overall are better for cities. They've reduced not only obviously-- they eliminate carbon emissions, but they reduce roadside pollution. That affects cities, especially dense areas, especially communities that have lower income. By putting that infrastructure in place for allowing people, whether they be fleet drivers or people that just want to convert to EV to see where they can charge, we're reducing the barriers that exist right now for EV ownership, which of course are the cost of EVs, which are going to start to go down starting next year.

The second barrier is where are we going to charge our cars? That's where we're creating that option. We started this because we said, is it chicken or egg? Are people going to buy EVs and then figure out where they're going to charge? We decided it's all egg. No, one's going to buy an EV if they can't walk out of their door in Ridgewood, in Crown Heights, in Flat Bush and see where they're going to charge their vehicle.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. It's all egg, our quote of the week on our climate story of the week from Tia in Crown Heights. Thank you very much. Dan, what about a national perspective on that? I guess we can assume that gas stations popped up everywhere in every kind of neighborhood because they make money. Does anybody make money on charging stations? If not, is it going to depend on the government to put charges everywhere so that there isn't EV inequality?

Dan Gearino: This issue, the question of where people will charge, when will they charge, and how will this intersect or not with the existing convenience store industry, these are some of the biggest questions about this transportation transition. I think from having written about this a lot, that one of the things a lot of people are missing is that a lot of the charging, the majority of the charging, maybe the large majority is going to take place at home overnight, or for commuters, at the workplace during the day.

Our idea of this gas station model where you need fuel, and you go to a place, and you get the fuel, this doesn't necessarily jive with the way that EV charging is going to work, especially initially say the next five to seven years. Partly because it takes a while for an EV to charge, it takes longer than it does to fill gas tank. I expect that charge times will go down as battery technology improves, as charging technology improves, and then it might at some future point be more of a gas station like experience.

The whole way that we do transportation is going to change. One of them is you're not going to necessarily go to a gas station anymore, or at least a lot of people, it will be more of something you're doing on trips and things like that.

Brian Lehrer: What about the cost of the cars if California and other states are going to mandate electric or other clean vehicles, they're more expensive. Right now, you can imagine that these costs will come down in the next decade as they get more mass produced. That happens with a lot of consumer goods, but do we know that's going to happen with electric vehicles? That could be another source of inequality if it doesn't come down.

Dan Gearino: We are heading toward a point where the cost of a new EV is going to be about the same as the cost of a gasoline vehicle. One of the biggest questions for researchers is when is that point? It's initially going to happen for small cars, and then it's going to move up through the different more expensive segments. It looks like this is we're on track for this to happen in the 2028 range, maybe 2030 range. Now, that means your purchase price would be about the same.

Now, a separate issue is the cost of ownership, because even if you're paying more for an EV, you're paying less for fuel, and you're also paying a lot less for maintenance. Already, there are certain EVs, especially like small cars again where your cost of ownership of an EV is less on an annual basis than it is for an equivalent gasoline model. We're heading toward that point. What has to happen is battery costs need to be cheaper. As auto makers make more and more EVs, they need to get better at making them more efficiently. That's what drives costs down.

This is what we saw with solar power. We've seen this with EV batteries already, where costs have been driven down like crazy, just in the last 5 to 10 years.

Brian Lehrer: Lewis in Queens. You're on WNYC. Hi, Lewis.

Lewis: Hi. What's your plan B if we still don't have enough Cobalt and lithium, then I think it's in the Congo to manufacture enough batteries? The electric grid is still deficient in many places, even California. They were told recently not to charge the cause because they're having rolling blackouts. What happened in Germany who got ahead of that with green technology, they're paying enormous amounts of money for energy because they went full-blown with renewables, windmills, sun solar panels.

They got caught in the middle because they can't keep up with that. They have to scale back now, and they have to go back to fossil fuels. When you get too far ahead of market forces, people pay the price for that.

Brian Lehrer: Lewis, thank you for your call. Well, some of that probably needs to be factored. Dan, I don't know if you can do it. I don't know the Germany story. I don't know if you do or if that's accurate, but what about sources-- but he's right that the other big story, another big story in the news today is possible rolling blackouts in California because of stresses on the power grid from the incredible heat caused by global warming.

There's another chicken and the egg question, and I imagine people with electric vehicles during rolling blackouts are going to have a harder time driving than people with gasoline-powered vehicles.

Dan Gearino: I should say, I am familiar with what's happened in Germany and the idea of using Germany as an example. Germany as an example when talking about the energy transition is fascinating because people who are both in favor of a rapid energy transition and would like to slow down the energy transition, both use Germany's example and just pick out different aspects of it. Germany isn't a really interesting example to look at when looking at the US because they're just a few steps ahead of us.

As far as these critical minerals issue, needing to import large amounts of things like cobalt and things that are toxic in their mining, and things that are expensive and are not plentiful. This is a big issue going forward, but I look at a lot of the reporting, and I do, is talking to people at national labs in the US. There is so much research happening right now to find battery technologies that rely less on those critical minerals and to improve mining techniques so that they're less harmful to the surrounding environment.

I don't want to just hand wave and say, "We're going to figure it out," but the demand for these is going to be such that there is a tremendous incentive for automakers and for researchers to figure it out. We're going to think that the batteries that are in vehicles 7 years from now or 10 years from now, they're just going to be different. We're going to get a lot better at making these. Based on just what I've seen in the time I've been covering this stuff, I'm confident that that can happen. At the same time, I don't want to minimize those concerns because it is. The critical minerals questions are important and that's one of the reasons there's so much effort being put into finding ways around those challenges.

Brian Lehrer: Louis, thank you for raising those questions. We're almost out of time. Two other things before you go. I don't know if you can do this one real quick, but is there a stat that says how much will be saved in terms of greenhouse emissions by this transition in California to all-electric new vehicle sales by 2035?

Dan Gearino: Yes. I get into some of those statistics from the California agency. It's in the piece that I wrote last week. If maybe you can include a link to it on your website. Yes, that is quantified. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. I should also mention that just banning the sale of new gasoline vehicles. A vehicle stays on the road about 18, or 20 years on average, so it'll be a while after that before. We'll be seeing gasoline vehicles for a while after that.

Brian Lehrer: The last thing, just in terms of how far the California law pulls along the rest of the country. As I understand it, 17 other states have emissions policies that are tied to California's current standards on emissions. Massachusetts, Washington State, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington DC as a city, and Virginia.

Though I've read that the state's Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin, says he'll try to repeal whatever is on the Virginia books that ties it to California. How does California drive policy in the rest of the country and how binding are those state laws?

Dan Gearino: It varies state to state, but California has a long history of having emissions rules that are more stringent than federal emissions rules. A number of states, the states that you named, have state policies that tie their emissions rules to California's rules. What California has done is updated its rules. Those other states have either existing rules that say they're going to imitate California or have a track record of imitating California's rules. Some of those are extremely likely to do so. Washington State, extremely likely. Massachusetts, extremely likely.

Some of the others it's we just have to see but it's a ways off and I expect there to be some substantial political debate at the state level about this. Even though the ultimate 2035 rules are a long way off, our political system really has to digest this. I don't think we've quite had the debate yet about what a transportation transition looks like. You look at what's happening in Virginia with that debate. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out here. I think we're going to hear a lot about this just in various political races going forward,

Brian Lehrer: Debate engaged here on our climate story of the week. Dan Gearino, reporter covering clean energy in the Midwest for Inside Climate News on California's law to phase out new gasoline-powered car sales by 2035. Thanks so much for talking with us about it.

Dan Gearino: Good to be here.

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