When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was recently asked about one of his boss’s unrealistic environmental plans — installing electric vehicle charging stations across the country — his answer caused CBS’s Margaret Brennan to laugh in his face.
Apparently trying not to let up on the laughs, Buttigieg then went on to blame the plane’s turbulence on climate change.
499,992 left
Ahead of the 2020 election, then-candidate Joe Biden
promised He told Americans in four debates and a CNN town hall interview that if elected, he would build 500,000 new charging stations across the country.
Biden reiterated the promise after taking over the White House.
state In November 2021, the company plans to create “the nation’s first network of more than 500,000 charging stations. … So you’ll be able to travel across the country, from the East Coast to the West Coast, just like you would stop at a gas station today. These charging stations will be available.”
That month, the then-Democrat-controlled Congress passed a comparable $1 trillion infrastructure package. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and 18 other Republicans, apparently unfazed by criticism from former President Donald Trump, then
helped Democrats passed the bill in the U.S. Senate.
Of the $1 trillion in taxpayer money put into the bill, $73 billion would go to updating the nation’s power grid to increase the supply of renewable energy, and $7.5 billion would go to building EV charging stations by 2030, as Biden has promised.
The funding allocated for this rollout should be enough to install at least 20,000 charging spots and 5,000 charging stations, according to EV policy analysis group Atlas Public Policy.
Years into the plan, Biden’s big-ticket promises seem increasingly unlikely to come to fruition.
In March, the Federal Highway Administration told The Washington Post that Biden
Planned Half a million EV charging stations are now operational, with a total of 38 locations where drivers in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania can plug in their vehicles.
POLITICO
I got it. Last year, a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that 1.2 million public chargers would be needed by 2030 to meet the demand artificially created by the Biden administration’s climate change agenda and associated regulations. As of June 2023, there were about 180,000 chargers nationwide.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and other Republicans
wrote In a letter to Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in February, they expressed concern that “American taxpayer money is being grossly mismanaged.”
Last weekend, Margaret Brennan spoke with the Biden administration’s Secretary of Transportation on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and pursued the issue further.
Ridiculous
“I want to ask about one part of your portfolio that I believe is in there, which you mentioned: charging stations. According to the Federal Highway Administration, of the $7.5 billion in taxpayer investment in 2021, only seven or eight charging stations have been installed.”
Said Brennan: Why didn’t this happen sooner?
“The President’s goal is to have 500,000 chargers installed by the end of the century. Installing chargers takes more than just sticking a little device in the ground. It also requires public works, and this is an entirely new area of federal investment.”
“But we’re working with all 50 states,” Buttigieg continued, “and each state is getting a set amount of funding to do this work.”
Brennan leaned forward and asked, “But seven or eight?”
“I repeat: 500,000 chargers by 2030,” Buttigieg replied.
Brennan laughed at Buttigieg’s suggestion and seemed incredulous at the prospect of an additional 499,992 chargers being installed and operational within the next six years.
“And the first few chargers are already starting to be physically built, but again, this is just the beginning of what’s to come,” Buttigieg added.
While the Biden administration acknowledges it is “still in the very early stages,” it is seeking to take gas-guzzling cars off the roads and replace them with electric vehicles that can take advantage of the few charging stations that exist.
In March, the administration announced rules to limit emissions from vehicles, requiring more than half of new cars to be so-called zero-emission vehicles by 2032.
report The New York Times.
Lighten
Although the answer was not satisfactory, Buttigieg had enough of a sense of caution.
The Transportation Secretary told Brennan, “The reality is that the effects of climate change are already being felt on transportation. We’re seeing them in everything from statistically impossible heat waves that threaten to melt cables in the Pacific Northwest transportation system to signs of an increasingly intense hurricane season and roughly a 15 percent increase in turbulence.”
a
study A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters last year suggested that clear-air turbulence “is predicted to become more frequent due to climate change”, and claimed that the most intense category of clear-air turbulence occurred 55% more often in 2020 than in 1979.
Brennan pressed Buttigieg on whether severe turbulence like that experienced by Singapore Airlines Flight SQ321 from London to Singapore last week might soon become common in the US.
“To be clear, extreme events like this are very rare, but turbulence does happen and sometimes it happens unexpectedly,” Buttigieg said. “This is about staying proactive and keeping aviation safe.”
The Face the Nation interview was accompanied by a community note about X,
National Transportation Safety Board data “There is no sign of an increase in aircraft turbulence accidents”
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