Jay Inslee isn’t alone in his desire to needlessly reward electric vehicle owners. As Shift reported, Inslee’s budget includes a 10-year extension of a sales tax break for electric vehicles. He also proposed a “bill credit on the electronic toll accounts of electric car drivers to cover a yet-to-be-determined number of free ferry trips or toll bridge crossings.”
Oregon is considering similar incentives for electric vehicle owners. Though Oregon does not have a sales tax, a public-private partnership called the Energize Oregon Coalition “has drafted legislation to offer a $3,000 rebate on battery-powered cars.” Oregon Department of Transportation electric car czar Ashley Horvat told KPLU, “In order to achieve our greenhouse gas reduction goals, EVs are a very critical part of that… We’re sort of seeing the adoption (of electric vehicles) plateau. So, we need that additional accelerator to push it beyond the early adopters.”
Inslee and other liberals claim that the sales tax break pushes car purchasers toward electric vehicle options, but the facts indicate otherwise. The Washington Policy Center’s Todd Myers wrote in February, “Even in the best case scenario, two out of three people benefitting from the sales tax break would have purchased the car anyway.” Myers also wrote that the impact of incentives “is probably very small and wastes huge amounts of money for tiny environmental benefit.” Why?
Myer’s analysis proves that “even in the best circumstances,” a sales tax exemption on electric vehicles “costs $136.41 to reduce one ton of carbon.” To put it into perspective, that is “more than ten times the cost to reduce a ton of carbon compared to investing in projects that reduce carbon… Instead of reducing 10 tons of CO2, the state only reduces one.”
Inslee’s push for a sales tax extension on extension—an Oregon’s push for incentives—has little to do with benefitting the environment and a lot to do with political gain at the expensive of working families. As Myers put it, the policy essentially taxes “working families to give tax breaks to people who can afford” an electric car, buyers who “are extremely price insensitive and it is unlikely that any of them would have decided not to buy the car without the sales tax break.”
Electric vehicle incentive policies are not about fighting global warming, they are “political touchstones for politicians who want to appear they are doing something by associating with a cool, new technology.”
They try to save carbon at one end but add to the carbon footprint on the other. Yes electric cars save carbon output from the vehicle but add to the footprint in the production of the electricity at the front end. Its a lie the ecos always put forward while ignoring how we get there. Hydrogen is the only fuel with a zero carbon footprint but the government will never get to hydrogen as long as we have a bridge fuel while we attempt to get there. We could have all hydrogen cars, trucks and transportation across the board in less than 10 years but Inslee and his bunch will never get there!!!
Going solely on fuzzy memory I think electric cars have a 5 year pollution head start before they even hit the road, meaning a gas powered car needs to drive 5 years to match the electric car in pollution before the electric car even hits the road.
That reminds me, I need to get a new Suburban………..