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Legislators in Kentucky and other fossil states charge EV drivers more than double in taxes than ICE drivers
https://electrek.co/2024/01/01/kentucky-electric-cars-now-pay-two-taxes-where-gas-cars-only-pay-one/
Various anti-environmental states in the US have implemented taxes specifically aimed to cripple the EV industry to the benefit of the oil and gas industry. This article talks about Kentucky, which implemented new EV-only taxes three days ago.
The gas tax is quite low in all US states, but the relative disparity in legislative treatment of what is objectively a more environmentally sustainable transportation option (EVs) speaks to the disdain for scientific facts and quality of human life that certain legislators carry.
My irritated remarks are premised on the provable beliefs that:
In general, it makes sense for a forward-thinking state government to find a way to replace the income stream from a gasoline tax with an income stream from an EV tax, which is undoubtedly the way these taxes would be defended by legislators. And they do serve that purpose. But to implement barriers to entry into the EV market for consumers while not raising taxes on fossil fuel-powered cars has the end effect of subsidizing the oil and gas industry as well as automakers who do not produce electric vehicles.
In general, more taxes on all vehicles are necessary in order to reduce car-dependency and encourage more transit use, with some obvious exceptions (please, no need to comment about literal farmers). But it is particularly counter-productive for government to incentivize the use of fossil fuel-powered vehicles.
These legislators are voted in, repeatedly, by their constituents. Most people (read: most people that care enough to go to a poll booth) want this behavior. In this case, the legislators are doing exactly what they are supposed to do - legislate what their constituents want.
The majority of their constituents want non-renewable energy. The majority of constituents want to punish the people advocating for cleaner air. The majority of constituents see electric cars as luxury vehicles and want to tax them higher.
The problem isn't just legislators trying to line their pockets in the short term, it's population wide. Apathy about the situation, disdain for their fellow humans, and fear about what would happen to their lives/families/jobs/whatever if anything changed at all.
Isn't this why, federally, we have the electoral college in the US? Originally, it was intended (in an admittedly elitist way) to act as a check against less educated populist sentiment?
We have a tendency to cringe at "elitism" in the US; however, so much so that we ignore expert advice in favor of anecdotal evidence (i.e., dubious cherry-picked examples AKA "alternate facts").
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." — Isaac Asimov, 1980
Sure but in terms of state level taxes there isn't an extra layer in there. The state is doing what the state wants.
There's a lot more to it than that. First is that incumbents have a massive advantage...primarying incumbants is generally frowned upon. And name recognition is one of the biggest factors for winning elections.
Second is the propaganda. It's pretty easy for politicians to just lie while campaigning and blame others when their lies get exposed.
Single-issue voters. None of the platform matters except for abortion or guns.
Playing dirty. Republicans in particular are happy to manipulate the fuck out of electoral maps to suppress opposition.
And often, less at the federal level...opposition is absent. State governments have a lot of unopposed politicians for the reasons above...it takes a lot of effort to try to mount an opposition campaign where the incumbant has run unopposed for a decade.
Everyone knows the quote "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity," right? I also like "never attribute stuff to malice."[1]
It seems far less likely to me that this is voters trying to punish the people advocating for clean air and a lot more likely that it's, as @mild_takes pointed out, a complex situation that maybe shouldn't be reduced to percentages the way it is in the article.
[1] obviously there are exceptions. Let's please not go crazy about the wording of this.
BEVs weigh, on average, considerably more than an equivalent ICE-only car. Damage to the road scales exponentially with the weight of the vehicle. Gas taxes exist to pay for maintenance to public roads. So BEVs do more damage to the roads, while not paying any gas tax. Because of the weight disparity, it’s not outrageous to ask BEVs to pay more than an equivalent gas-powered car in taxes that go to road maintenance.
I agree that very high and quadratically scaled weight taxes for vehicles are beneficial for society and should be implemented everywhere.
With a 4x multiplier when that vehicle is also not subject to a gas tax.
I'd like to see a federal carbon tax on gasoline, and roads funded by a tax based on axle weight and annual odometer readings instead of a gas tax.
That way heavy SUVs and pickups are nailed twice by a nasty weigh tax and again for higher fuel consumption. EVs pay their share for road damage but aren't taxed for carbon, and gasoline vehicles are incentivized to be efficient and light.
A weight tax sounds like a great idea. As it is now car manufacturers have no incentive to manufacture actual cars and I’d really like to buy a new one.
Yep. Fortunately, the Civic, Accord, Corolla and Camry still exist. It's very unfortunate that most smaller hatchbacks have been removed from the US market though. (I'm a big fan of the Honda Fit, which has sadly had that happen.)
Problem there is, who's to say where I racked up those miles? Say I register in NH or Florida and drive to California and back - does NH get my 'milage' despite me tearing across the country? I guess it probably averages out that most people don't do that.
Charging and gas stations should cover the cost of your vehicle travelling through, that's slightly ($wise) how state gas taxes address outside registration.
It's clear that we do need a radical revaluation of roadway taxes but where does 4x come from?
From the article:
"In actuality, virtually all road damage is done by diesel semi trucks anyway, not gas or electric cars, so road damage has little to do with passenger vehicles."
I think what it comes down to is that nobody is paying their fair share for road maintenance. There's not necessarily one right way to do it either, but everyone is invested in keeping their own costs as low as possible.
I agree. That’s why I’m not all that bothered by this law. The situation before or after the law is far from perfect, but the law is bringing a class of vehicle that previously avoided all road maintenance taxes, and making them pay something. It’s far from perfect, but I’m not convinced it’s a step in the wrong direction.
Even if EVs weighed twice what an equivalent ICE car did, they would still be a rounding error compared to trucking. Running studded tires for a few months will do more damage to the road than a lifetime of switching to an EV.
Fair point for sure. I’ll note though that the equation is not as simple as weight alone - it’s about pressure (weight over the contact patches of the vehicle’s tires) and frequency. Semi trucks have more tires so their weight is distributed over a larger area, which surely helps at least a bit. Still, one semi truck will surely do more damage than one car. But frequency matters a lot too, especially given that certain types of roads will not see much truck traffic, yet all roads still need to be maintained.
This is a pretty disingenuous argument. There just aren't 140mpg ICE cars/trucks. Using whatever ballpark figure of gas consumption they have a car would have to do better than 35mpg to pay less than $120.
Then there is the $0.03 per kWh. Thats kind of double dipping IMO but it's also not too outrageous. I would imagine the bulk of charging people do is at home. That tax would then catch out of state drivers as well as local EV owners who drive more than average.
On the face of it this policy sounded like retribution for being green but seeing what the actual tax is... I don't think its out of line. If you use the roads then you need to contribute and we can't subsidise EV owners forever.
I also wasn't a big fan of the article comparing the taxes on EVs and ICEs as a percentage figure, for the same reason. Sure, the charging tax might amount to 22% compared to 11% for an ICE, and that's twice as high in relation to the underlying per-mile consumable cost, but if you're getting 4x the miles out of $5 of electrons compared to $5 in gasoline, it's a disingenuous comparison, since now the EV is only paying half the tax per mile driven.
There's a side argument to be made that using gasoline/electricity consumption as a proxy for miles driven is always going to be subject to distortions based on each vehicle's energy efficiency, and we should just pull odometer readings and tax based on miles instead. It would be politically difficult to accomplish, if done as a lump sum with annual registrations, since it's so much more salient to voters. But it would eliminate the differences between EVs and ICEs, and the variances between cars.
I don't doubt that the primary motivation behind these taxes is to punish the libs.
I do want to reiterate that there should be some kind of use tax applied to electric vehicles to recoup infrastructure costs.
I continue to rail against electric, though. Maybe electric the best the US can do, but diesel is a better transitional option in my opinion. Well tuned, it can more than double the mpg of an ICE. It can be sourced form organic waste products. It produces less toxic gas pollution, and the particulate matter issue has been solved. It doesn't come with all the nastiness of battery production and disposal. It takes way less time to refuel, and the fuel distribution infrastructure is already in place.
Of course, smaller vehicles and better transit would make most of this conversation moot. Unfortunately, Most in the US would rather die than give up their single family, detached house and ample parking at the olive garaden.
I think the bio-diesel take is an interesting one as I find myself drifting back and forth between biofuels as a part of the future of energy in transportation, and electric only (50 to 100 years from now). I think there's a genuine issue with making bio-fuels carbon neutral. Additionally, you don't gain the clean air benefits from battery electric vehicles. Even if your BEVs are being charged with electricity produced through combustion at a central power plant, you're still significantly improving the air quality in urban areas. If most of that electricity is source through renewables than I don't think there's any competition on the emissions side. I find myself becoming most skeptical of bio-diesel as a main source of energy for the future of most vehicles in light of the air pollution issue alone. Additionally there's the opportunity cost of the land required for production of biofuels (from waste or crops grown directly for biofuel production) that likely requires more land than is already taken up by petroleum production and processing.
I think for long distance trucking we may really struggle to fully electrify those vehicles. I think hybrid diesel trucks may be a good compromise in the case of long-haul trucking (that can't be served by trains) where the engine runs at a fixed speed and charges the onboard batteries and drives the electric motors (much like an electric-diesel train).
Do you have a source for the idea that the life cycle emissions and pollution from the manufacturing and operation of bio-fueled vehicles is actually better than those of a battery vehicle? I haven't seen a case for this from an environment and climate point of view, only on the cost side. And I'm not sure the cost assumptions being used around batteries and BEVs will hold up well based on the rapid innovation and investment we've been seeing in battery technologies.
Ut’s really hard to quantify environmental impacts in a way to compare impacts, and harder to find credible sources. But the impacts are well known and pretty dire for lithium and lead acid on the extraction and disposal sides. And we are at least one order of magnitude, maybe several, lower production than we would need to replace current fleet with bevs.
But that’s just the vehicles themselves. Part of the point tca is that bevs have a significantly greater infrastructure impact. Guess what a major input to road maintenance and development is? Fossil fuels. So maybe the cars are cleaner, but now infrastructure is much dirtier. Hard to determine the net.
Again, smaller cars and more transit makes the argument moot.