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Trump Administration Wants To End Subsidies For Electric Cars, Renewables (reuters.com)
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Monday that the United States wants to end subsidies for electric cars and other items including renewable energy sources. "Asked about actions planned after General Motors announced U.S. plant closings and layoffs last week, Kudlow said he expected subsidies for buying electric cars will end in 2020 or 2021," reports Reuters. "Kudlow said the Trump administration will end other subsidies, including on 'renewables.'"
We shouldn't be subsidizing luxury vehicles for the wealthy.
Put the money into public transport and renewable energy instead.
If, as is often stated here, renewables are the most cost-effective energy sources, then they shouldn't need subsidies.
And if they Do, in fact, need the subsidies, then they're NOT the most cost-effective energy sources....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This is only reasonable if we tax fossil fuels. Renewables are generally cleaner than fossil fuels, though not entirely clean. Energy should be taxed based on the costs to repair the environmental damage that has to be cleaned up and the costs of mitigating their impacts. In this respect, fossil fuels are far more expensive and should be taxed at a higher rate that reflects their true costs of use.
Fine, but take the rest of the subsidies with them. Whether that's the farmers, the oil companies, the various housing subsidies, or anyone else getting a deal. The U.S. has slowly morphed into a petty kleptocracy where everyone is picking everyone else's pocket. Just end the madness and let the people who are incapable fail. There's no need (other than votes) for the government to try to prop them up.
The rest of America has to tighten its belt, though
What a shit show. Let it burn.
Of course he does. Pushing renewables hurts profits for his buddies - that own most of his business - in Red Square.
He's the President. He fucks porn stars, models, and centerfolds. You're whining on Slashdot. Who's the moron?
Either the people who say renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels are right or not. I'll keep an eye on my energy company Xcel.
Last time I checked, the US Constitution says it's Congress, specifically starting in the US House of Representatives, that makes laws.
Presidents who don't control the House have very very very little power.
They're Weak.
Sad.
Maybe he should try getting an actual trade deal with China, because the Chinese translation of the "deal" says he has no deal, so he's just being Weak. Again.
Take that and stuff it in your Denial pipe.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
We should give generous subsidies to nuclear energy. Minor subsidies should be given to current reactors to keep them above water. Major subsides (100's of billions to start) should be spent on next generation nuclear. NuScale has passed phase 1 of the NRC review, and their first 12 SMR's are going to be built in Idaho. We should heavily subsidize this project and all future ones. We should also subsidize other 4th generation nuclear when their reactors pass nrc review. If and only if we do that, we will have a chance at mitigating climate change.
If EV is to "take off" they need to compete in the level playing field. If you have to use a subsidies to get people to buy these overpriced, under powered (range) things, then it won't work. Plus, they require more energy to produce, more energy to recharge (not to mention time required to charge), and have extremely caustic batteries that wear out and need to be disposed of.
The URL in the top post leads to a story about trade talks. Different source, but the material about subsidies.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
$20 billion per year in DIRECT subsidies for fossil fuels, not including cleanup, military spending, health care costs and similar. https://www.vox.com/energy-and... As long as you remove the $20B fossil fuel subsidy, you can level the playing field and remove the ~$7B from renewables. There's no question where the investments will be going forward.
Keyboard warrior watches the world burn on his flatscreen display. Rage on, bro.
You energy company Xcel has invested heavily in wind energy. They are shutting down coal plants or converting them to natural gas.
So there is your answer.
(I work in the energy business.)
Yup. Pretty much. Just when I was about to consider getting my first American car in many years (a Volt), this comes along and GM kills it.
I guess a Prius V will have to do, but the shortsightedness all for Trump's nonexistent political gain (except among morons who will, as manufacturing employees, bear the brunt of the line shutdowns) really bothers me. We need strategic vision, not Trump's idiotic posturing to show whose balls are bigger.
Yes we should let Alexandra Ocasio Cortez run the country. She is absolutely brilliant.
WE ALREADY MASSIVELY SUBSIDIZE NUCLEAR IDIOT. HUGE MONEY IS NOT ENOUGH.
The TINY amount we spend on renewables compared to oil or nuclear has demonstrated that it's in fact money well spent, as your spent fuel rod pools hit critical mass nationwide because it's just too expensive to deal with.
Nuclear is a LONG TERM SOLUTION, if it's going to be invested in again at all. Renewables are a short medium AND long term solution for pennies on the dollar.
God damn it's like you have to explain this basic shit one bit after another, again and again, to every single radioactive retard republican on /. like it's brand new information... Jesus Christ.
Trump wants to subsidize coal burning steam horseless carriages to MAGA.
Captcha: tyranny
You're on 2 or 3 levels of post-ironic metasnark there buddy
claims solar and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuels so why would anyone here complain unless they were lying?
How about we end all the billions spent having the US Navy ensure oil is able to be pumped and shipped out of the Middle East?! The 5th fleet isn't based in Bahrain because of the weather.
In the name of "man made" Global Warming!!!! Oh noes!!!
(I do not like welfare. For individuals AND companies.
Corporatism != Free Market
I see this counter argument all the time, but I have never seen numbers to back it up.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Where does this article even begin to discuss "subsidies"? The word does NOT appear anywhere in the article.
Clickbait much, Slashdot?
Perhaps they'll also kill the (up to) $12 Billion in subsidies to farmers getting hammered by the Administration's own tariffs. Oh, wait ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is just Trump fluffing the Saudis.
Thanks for that imagery.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
To the tune of about 50 cents per gallon. This far, far exceeds the subsidy oil companies receive, which works out to less than 10 cents per gallon even if you attribute the entire subsidy to gasoline (they make other products with oil too, like kerosene, asphalt, plastics). I think heating oil is the only petroleum product which is generally exempted from taxes (because poor people freezing to death in winter makes bad press for politicians).
You can argue we're not taxing fossil fuels enough. But it's silly to pretend they're not taxed. As the Tesla EVs are rated at about 30 kWh per 100 miles, at the U.S. average electricity price of 11.5 cents/kWh, that works out to $3.45 of electricity per 100 miles. A 25 MPG vehicle pays $2 in fuel taxes per 100 miles, so its taxes amount to 58% of the electricity price needed to power the EV. In some states with higher fuel taxes, the fuel tax alone is about the same as the cost of electricity to power an EV over the same route.
I have a regular sized/shaped penis
Since you're a female, how do you account for that?
Huge advantage for Electric Tanks. Less that can go wrong, More space for shells... ect... Keep the subsidies/ tech improvements coming. :)
[($)]
Those of us with solar panels on our roofs in states that offer "SREC" credits should already be used to this....
Once promised as a great way to make your solar panels pay for themselves, SRECs are now practically worthless in every state with the program, except for maybe Washington DC. (That's only true there because a lot of people can't put solar panels up since they rent or live in multi-level properties where they don't own rights to put things on the roof. And another big segment of DC is too poor to be able to afford them, regardless of subsidies. It's pretty rare in DC to own a property with a lot of square footage, where you can generate a lot of power from panels, too.)
As far as I'm concerned, you shouldn't need a government tax credit to justify your purchase of a vehicle. Everyone I've met who purchased a new Tesla, for example, could afford the car without that credit and would, indeed, have purchased it anyway. The rest of us who own them waited to get a deal on an older, used one, which didn't qualify for the credit in the first place.
You might have SOME argument that the credit is more attractive to the middle class customer who considers a car like a Chevy Volt / Bolt or a Nissan Leaf. But even then, I think a lot of those buyers are only buying them because they're on an "environmentally friendly" kick, trying to prove they leave a small carbon footprint. IMO, that's financially foolish of them - but who am I to tell others how to spend their money? Again, if you're honestly buying because you're trying to come out ahead with cost savings on gasoline, you'd be a lot further ahead of the game to buy a used one.
I assume he'll also be ending subsidies for fossil fuels, right?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
While there may be tax credits at the Federal level, at least 17 states charge additional registration fees for electric vehicles once the battery gets above a small (hybrid) battery size.
They do this to make up for loss gas taxes, but charge for such at a flat rate that does not factor in mileage or if you have a plug-in hybrid.
So if you purchase your electricity from charging stations which try to be gas-price equivalents, you end up paying more to fuel an electric car than had you just fueled a gas one.
When Georgia implemented their fee (one of the highest at $200/year, $300/year for commercial use), Tesla sales fell 83% and did not recover. This was true even though the state also had an electric-car income-tax purchase discount.
The batteries are expensive, but what is not discussed as frequently is the battery lifespan. Many consumer lithium ion batteries are limited to ~500-1000 charge/discharge cycles. For a 200 mile range vehicle, like the Model S, that will give a good 200,000 miles. If the lifespan was bumped up to 5,000 or 10,000 charge cycles, I'd be a lot more willing to make the big investment for a BEV.
..or earlier, and he tries to do that by fiat.
Meanwhile fossil fuels are not only helping destroy the environment of the planet we live on, but they're also a limited resource. So-called 'renewables' are not a limited resource, by definition. We need to move away from polluting, limited resources, and towards non-polluting, renewable resouces. People are creatures of habit; they're not going to change without a reason to do so. You have two basic philosophies to help you motivate them: carrot, or stick. Subsidies are the carrot; taxes are the stick. People greatly prefer the carrot. Make renewables, and electric vehicles, more affordable for a while until they're well-established, and the move to them will be self-sustaining. Meanwhile make fossil fuels more and more unattractive (the stick), and people will shy away from them. Eventually: mission accomplished. Away from fossil fuels and towards alternatives is the direction we inevitably need to go. Meanwhile Trump wants to turn all this upside down, and use the Stick on the alternatives, and give the Carrot to the Old Ways. He is clearly wrong.
The $7500 EV tax credit was put in place by an Act of Congress. Only another Act of Congress can repeal it - the Trump Administration cannot unilaterally order it's removal.
Otoh, there's a possibility that Kudlow might just be spitballing that by 2021 all the major vehicle manufacturers will have sold their 500k's worth of eligible vehicles triggering the tax credit's automatic phase out.
Fossil fuels ARE taxed - What do you think the riots in France are about?
Why do you think there was a ballot issue in California this past November to roll-back a big hike in those taxes? (the ballot issue failed because the state government is dominated by Democrats and they renamed the initiative, labelling it a bill to halt all bridge and road repairs). California drivers give more money to the government on each gallon of gas than they give to the oil companies (CA gas taxes are that high - people simply ignorantly get mad at the gas stations instead of the politicians).
The joke, of course, is that if you get everybody to move to electric cars, the governments involved will need to put a huge new miles-driven tax on them (or a giant new registration fee, etc) in order to get as much tax from them as they currently get by taxing gasoline and diesel fuel. The problem will be most severe in places like California where the politicians have a long history of shifting gas tax money over into the general fund and using it to preserve the pensions of retired state workers instead of maintaining the roads.
Your first error was in pointing to the morons at Vox... but you doubled-down by apparently not noticing where they got their factoids: Oil Change International who (by their own admission are "a research, communication, and advocacy organization focused on exposing the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitating the coming transition towards clean energy". Oh, and like all propaganda crap sandwiches (on both the left and the right) they are based in Washington DC where they can be optimally politically corrupt and pass around unaccountable influence and cash.
So, this is like quoting a defense contractor on the need to go to war, or quoting the people at Westborough Baptisi Church on the dangers of homosexuality.
The simple fact is that a SUBSIDY is when government takes money from one person or group and transfers it to somebody else to support them or what they're doing. This is very different from a TAX BREAK, where government simply does not take as much money as they otherwise would have from a person or group. The fossil fuels people (in the US) do NOT get subsidies - they get tax breaks, and mostly the same ones other industries get. Leftwing propagandists are always playing with the ignorance of their own supporters by trying to conflate these two very different things. If you want to go with the idea that a tax break is the same as a subsidy and that we must get rid of those breaks, then your "green" energy and e-car companies will be truly screwed as they get BOTH and would lose BOTH exposing them as truly insanely un-economic.
The US is currently exporting more energy than it imports.
The US Navy is guarding the flow of middle east oil for the same reason no that it was back when I was in uniform: Our allies and the global markets are hooked on that oil, and yet none of our allies or trading partners are being responsible enough to pull their own weight defending it.
It's one of the reasons Trump got elected and that he has been pressuring NATO - decades of America's allies becoming flaccid and simply assuming that the American taxpayer will keep funding a massive US military to defend the interests of our irresponsible "friends". The problem exists in the North Atlantic alliance, in the Asian alliance, and in many other areas; many of the same allies who simply assume we will keep defending their interests forever for free (because we've had a series of presidents with "kick me" signs on their backs) also tend to have trade imbalances with us and maintain unbalanced trade barriers.
Busy making money because the economy was doing fucking great. When times are good, no one gives a fuck about politics. You're just a troll.
If not, then why the subsidy for old ones? Maybe you should stop subsidising the wealthy with tax cuts. The tax cut for the rich is more than the subsidies for all renewable projects put together, yet you cheered that one.
You idiotic hatred of anyone you perceive to be to the left of you is patent.
And that makes the tax breaks the oil industry gets patently clear, yet you fuckwits STILL insist "this is not the subsidy you are looking for".
And the taxes are the cost of the product (crude oil). How the fuck else do the owners (government) of the crude oil get paid for it? If they put a price per gallon extracted on it, the government would be determining the floor price of the end product.
And your pin sized brain would explode in rage.
So instead the government tax the end product.
This is no different than any other fucking markup. Do you whine that a 2% cut is taken by the CC companies from purchases, to pay for their infrastructure? Hell no.
But when it's "EEEBIL GUBMENT!!!!" doing it, suddenly, you don't care. MUST HATE GOVERNMENT!
Moron.
Doesn't matter what it's for, that subsidy is still a subsidy. And renewable energy, EVs and all the rest are ALSO benefitting the poor, so they too should be counted by you as NOT A SUBSIDY.
Yes, even if you claim that poor people can't afford EVs, they DO profit from them by having less pollution. The poor, you see, like you, cannot get time off for visiting the doctor, because the boss doesn't want a worker taking time off from making stuff the company sells. Rich people are the bosses, so they don't have a problem with taking time off. So when a health benefit exists, the poor get a better ROI than the wealthy, unlike tax cuts which is the reverse. Which is why the rich LIKE tax cuts and HATE environmental regulations.
Quick, cue all the NPCs attacking the evil orange man.
Nobody should be paying taxes to subsidise this massive con trick. There is no such thing as catastrophic man-made global warming.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
f it costs the same as an average new car, then why the need for a tax credit?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This actually looks like some smart politic-ing by Trump. The federal subsidy is basically coming to an end on its own, as planned. The credit phases out after a manufacturer reaches 200,000 sales. According to Wikipedia, Tesla has hit that number, GM is about 4,000 away from hitting it, and all the other manufacturers are around half way there. With sales increasing I'm sure they'll hit it pretty quickly too.
End result is that for al intents and purposes, the subsidy is going to phase itself out over the next year or so. So basically Trump says, "we'll end the subsidy", and then the subsidy ends on its own for all the major manufacturers, and Trump claims victory. His constituents see action, while the businesses get what was initially promised to them.
Administration should outlaw gasoline only cars that get less than 40 mpg. Hybrids and EV cars are good enough now.
Just build the damn wall!
That oil is free to the oil companies. And that subsidy if far greater than what renewable get. Yes, they might pay some state taxes on what they extract but the Federal Government gives them a depletion allowance. They get money for pumping oil they don't own out of the ground.
Like the Chinese Communist Party that is ruling, and a dictator on top of it. Will you replicate any of it in US as well?
It is clear that all the electric things China has was to ape the West. When US stops the expensive nonsense of electric cars, China might in fact follow the suit.
And the solution is well known: big cities should rely on public transportation, like in Europe. Electric trams go a long way and do not need any expensive, explosive batteries.
Outside of the big cities, there is no alternative to gas.
Policy areas where Republicans were drastically wrong:
Iraq War: wrong
Deregulating Wall Street: wrong
Gays in the military: wrong
Global warming: wrong
I have never yet heard any Republican apologize for being so wrong so badly so many times.
The vast, vast majority of people don't have electric cars. Is the fact that urban tanks are the best-selling cars a good thing? Probably not. Still, this is clearly not an incentive and a lot of resources are benefitting a tiny, tiny handful of people. It's called: 'This didn't work, let's try something else.', not, 'I hate the earth and want it to die.'. Be pissed at the American consumer if you insist on choosing a target.
Are you going to offer me a quest or what?
So the down modder doesn't know why it's a problem then?
A tax break or mechanism available to all businesses is not a subsidy of a specific industry.
Oil is a strategic reserve. Tanks, warplanes, warships runs on oil
Governments of G20 will keep and support oil industry.
We will cut oil in civil sectors, but not completely. This means we will be far far away from 0% emissions for a long time. Learn to live in +5 degrees climate.
Now.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Taxes are NOT the cost of a product, though they are indeed a component of the cost.
As for the government being the owners of crude oil... um yeah, in China or the Soviet Union etc. In the United States, the crude oil is owned by the property owner and most of the expanded oil drilling in the US in the past decade was on PRIVATE LAND since Obama restricted it on national land. Where the oil is extracted from federal lands in the US, it is still not the government's oil - it is considered to belong to the public (NOT the same thing) and in places like Alaska the members of the public actually get a payment. The oil under federal lands it typically valued very low for a simple reason: it has no value sitting deep in the earth - the value only is there when somebody spends lots of money extracting it (this is the value add that justifies a price). If the government was doing all the prospecting and the extraction, then the government would indeed be justified in charging for it as you suggest.
Go back to your comic book collection until you grow up and learn to engage in civilized dialog.
LOL. Strawman of the year.
You are describing a tax rebate, not a tax credit.