To bolster declining electric car sales, President Biden told EPA to create a new emissions standard. The agency put epidemiologists to work and declared that X (fill in any number you like, it's epidemiology, that's what they did) life-years have been lost without electric cars and trucks, and created a new emissions-standard that is effectively a ban on their competitors.

Thanks to a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, a 'Chevron deference' judgment that for no sane reason has not been challenged, Presidents can do that. If they want to create a law without Congress, they direct an agency to do it. Because the Chevron Deference ruling found that agencies could create any regulation if it's in their mandate, a President can just change their mandate. President Biden did it with CDC when he wanted to control rental properties in the US (struck down) and EPA when he wanted to declare a man-made pond on a farm a Navigable Water of the United States (struck down) and when his own government employees didn't want to get a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine (not struck down, he only made OSHA tell the private sector to do that.)

The Biden EPA has been breathtaking in its unabashed willingness to do anything, no matter how specious the goal, when directed. The group quite literally asked a court to vacate an EPA science finding out safe use of a weedkiller named atrazine so their epidemiologists could invent a new level that makes it a ban.

That's what he is doing with EPA and emissions also. It is no secret that few want electric cars, they are for the 0.6%. If you are rich, sure, the government paid you to buy them, along with the solar panels on your mansion, and you get to use a government-mandated carpool lane, but because it is a government works project and not anything people want, no one is building charging stations, and there is no free market reason to bring electric car costs down. Companies laid off employees until they got down to the number they needed to build electric vehicles, Hertz is dumping 20,000 electric cars because the maintenance and insurance costs are high and no one wants to rent them, and Tesla walked away from a government-provided small fortune rather than be stuck eventually losing a large fortune on charging stations.


EPA Administrator Michael Regan

With incentives failing, only a ban was left, but President Biden doesn't want that court challenge, which is why he got EPA to do the dirty work again.  By creating a new emissions standard, and claiming it is "science", he gets a ban without a ban.

What is Nebraska or any other state where poor people live going to do, tell Biden's epidemiologists their 'virtual lives saved' are just made-up nonsense? Everyone in science knows they're made-up nonsense, that is why the International Agency for Research on Cancer and Harvard School of Public Health are the butts of science jokes, but you can't prove it in court.

They're going to try, so they have sued Biden in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and 23 other states where rich people don't own electric cars joined. Nebraska doesn't have an electric charging station. Not one. Yet the President is using EPA to force them onto people who aren't on the coasts.

Can they win when it invariably goes to the Supreme Court? I'll write that amicus brief right now. The 72,000,000 people EPA claims they are protecting from dangerous pollution aren't at risk at all, because it isn't real pollution, it is only small-micron particulate matter. It is so small EPA epidemiologists would have to use an electron microscope to see it, if they ever looked at more than surveys and then drew lines of correlation and clicked 'publish.' But once real pollution, the kind that does kill people, was basically eliminated in the 1990s (outside natural geographical basins like Los Angeles) the target got moved to 25 percent of the actual PM10 killer. Suddenly air quality maps could be red again and we'd need more reasons for government to do things.

There are no deaths that can be attributed to PM2.5, no cases of asthma, nothing that isn't PM10, like wildfires. Invoking PM2.5 bans as preventing disease or death is like claiming acupuncture plus chemotherapy cures cancer - the acupuncture is just a science barnacle, it isn't doing anything.

The President is trailing badly in modern battleground states and more ways to look like he only represents wealthy people on the coasts while claiming they are saving the earth is bad timing, with an election a few months away. If he continues to push electric car evangelism and call it science, his EPA directives may be a non-issue, because a new EPA will just undo it.

Or not. Science is not a constituency. Academics in science historically vote Democrat no matter how uninformed and anti-science their party's positions are, from vaccines to GMOs to nuclear, and science has never become a constituency on its own. Efforts to create a science constituency and promote candidates have been exposed as fronts for the Democratic party, which means even their own party won't be able to trust claims it is about science in the future.