President Joe Biden’s push to accelerate the nation’s transition toward electric vehicles offers him a game-changing opportunity to jolt the climate change debate — if he can quell simmering tension between two key elements of the Democratic coalition.
If Biden can convince auto companies and autoworkers that they will prosper in a historic transition that replaces the internal combustion engine with zero-emission electric vehicles, that could allow him to build support for aggressive actions on the climate crisis across the industrial Midwestern states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota that remain key to the Democrats’ political fortunes.
Such a consensus — which took a giant step forward when General Motors last week set a goal of transitioning its entire line of cars and trucks by 2035 to vehicles that don’t emit any greenhouse gases — would reconfigure the map of the climate debate. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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