The Biden-Harris administration is facing pressure to crack down on car advertisements that misleadingly characterize electric vehicles as "zero-emission" vehicles, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, four lawmakers led by Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) urged her to develop guidelines "to limit untruthful claims of zero-emission vehicles." Ernst—alongside Sens. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), Kevin Cramer (R., N.D.), and Pete Ricketts (R., Neb.)—noted the British Advertising Standards Authority requires auto companies to make clear in ads that EVs are only zero-emission when being driven.
The lawmakers' letter further noted that EVs consume a large amount of energy, much of which is powered by fossil fuel sources like natural gas and coal. And they added that mining process for critical minerals required in EV batteries is even more carbon-intensive.
"The Biden-Harris administration’s heavy-handed push for EVs conveniently ignores the environmental impacts these vehicles have," the four senators wrote in the letter, which was first obtained by the Free Beacon. "The lifecycle of an EV is far from zero-emission."
"While the president and vice president may wish to mislead the American people, it is the FTC’s duty to protect consumers from false and misleading advertisements," they continued. "We ask the FTC to investigate how EVs are being advertised and marketed to consumers."
The letter underscores the ongoing debate surrounding EVs, which Democrats and environmentalists have pushed as part of their climate and decarbonization agenda, despite lackluster demand from consumers. Republicans and energy experts, though, have opposed EV mandates, noting they are generally more expensive, warning that required EV charging infrastructure is far from being built out, and arguing EVs themselves are reliant on fossil fuels for charge.
It remains unclear whether the FTC will open an investigation into automakers' EV ads, but the Republicans asked for a response by the end of September. The FTC declined to comment.
In their letter, Ernst, Crapo, Cramer, and Ricketts highlighted a 2022 MIT study showing that for every ton of lithium mined, 15 tons of carbon dioxide are emitted, meaning 3,069 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced for every pound of lithium mined. In addition to lithium, copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt, and graphite are key minerals that are needed to produce EVs.
The Free Beacon in 2023 reported on a Manhattan Institute study showing that driving an EV can produce more emissions than driving an internal combustion engine car. The study cast doubt on the Biden-Harris administration's claim that EVs will "play a central role in radically cutting carbon dioxide emissions."
Overall, there are more than 200 kilograms of minerals per EV while a conventional car is manufactured with less than 40 kilograms of minerals, mainly copper and manganese, according to the International Energy Agency.
Using federal data, the lawmakers calculated that charging an EV for daily use is equivalent to running five washing machine cycles every day. Only a tiny amount of that electricity used for charging EVs is generated from green energy sources like wind and solar, which produce just 14 percent of the nation's power. Fossil fuel-fired power plants, on the other hand, generate 60 percent of the nation's electricity and nuclear plants generate another 19 percent.
"An EV is only emission-free when it runs out of battery on the side of the road between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s $7.5 billion ‘network’ of seven charging stations," Ernst said in a statement to the Free Beacon. "We need to slam the brakes on more lies from Biden and Harris and hit reverse on their green new scam increasing costs for hardworking Iowans and making America reliant on China and slave labor."
The Advertising Standards Authority in the United Kingdom in February issued the guidelines referenced by Ernst and her fellow GOP senators in response to a BMW ad for its EV models. The British regulator determined BMW's characterization of the EVs as having zero emissions "misleadingly represented the vehicles’ environmental impact."
"We understood that when electric vehicles were driven no emissions were produced, unlike a car with a petrol or diesel engine where emissions came from the tailpipe," the agency said at the time. "However, in other circumstances, such as the manufacture or charging of an electric vehicle using electricity from the national grid, emissions were generated. For that reason an ad that featured a ‘zero emissions’ claim, that did not make explicitly clear that it was related to the reaction of the vehicle while it was being driven was likely to mislead."
That ruling came months after a similar determination from Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission, which drafted advertising guidance for automakers stating that emissions are generated during the "manufacturing process or when charging the vehicle."
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