Biden wants to coax Americans into electric cars. These 3 groups have other ideas.

People in the oil industry were surprised at how ambitious EPA’s newest rule is, multiple oil industry lobbyists said, complaining that Biden’s regulators had skipped the Obama administration’s practice of meeting with outside groups while prepping a rule.

“The administration on these things, they tend to go big,” said Bruce Thompson, CEO of oil and grid consulting and lobbying firm CapeDC Advisors, adding that he saw the proposal mostly as a messaging exercise meant to energize Biden’s green supporters. “It’s almost as if they’re trying to convince people they’re actually doing something. It’s way over the top… I suspect a lot of this is theater.”

Biden’s supporters said they’re sure the new rules will hold up in court, noting that Congress enacted a climate law last year that’s pouring billions of dollars into the effort to get more electric cars on the road. And administration officials expressed confidence that the auto industry can meet the EPA’s audacious goal of having electric vehicles account for two-thirds of new sales by 2032 — despite the carmakers’ public misgivings.

“When I look at the projections that many in the automobile industry have made, this is the future,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Wednesday morning during the proposal’s official unveiling. “The consumer demand is there. The markets are enabling it. The technologies are enabling it.”

But whether the rule can succeed depends on multiple complicated issues, including the average electric vehicle’s hefty price tag, the patchy state of the nation’s charging infrastructure, and the Treasury Department’s recent tightening of a $7,500 tax incentive that was supposed to make EVs more affordable. Other challenges include China’s dominance of the supply chain for batteries and the need to upgrade the U.S. power grid.

Here are the opponents who could make the task even tougher:

Republicans and red state attorneys general push back

Republicans in Congress are already stoking the fires of what could be the next big culture war: A fight over what’s in Americans’ driveways. And they’re invoking the partisan flare-up from earlier this year over another fossil-fuel touchstone of Americana — a false accusation that Biden was proposing to ban gas stoves.

“First President Biden came for our gas stoves,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Wednesday morning. “Now he wants to ban the cars we drive.”

Biden does, in fact, want to get millions of Americans to give up their gasoline-powered cars. And there’s not much that Republicans in Congress can do about it immediately, aside from attempting to pass a resolution that would roll back the EPA rule. (Biden could veto such a resolution.)

But a coalition of 17 attorneys general from GOP-led states has already sued over an earlier EPA auto-emissions rule, along with plaintiffs from the oil and gas industry. Though none of those states have yet explicitly threatened to sue over this latest version, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey hinted Wednesday that another multistate legal challenge could be on the way. “We’ll be ready to once again lead the charge against wrongheaded energy proposals like these,” Morrisey said in a statement.

He also said the new rule showed that “this administration is hell bent on destroying America’s energy security and independence” and making the U.S. dependent on resources from “countries like China and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Oil, gas and ethanol sharpen their knives

The oil and gas industry for the most part seems to be happy to let other industries poke holes in the rule, or for it to collapse under its own weight, lobbyists told POLITICO — or both.

But the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the main trade association representing refining companies, will be pushing the administration to make changes. And EPA is on shaky legal ground if it doesn’t, said Patrick Kelly, the group’s senior director for fuel and vehicle policy.

“I don’t think Congress has given the EPA authority to do this,” Kelly said in an interview just after an initial reading of the rule. “We need to look at where the EPA may have drifted into the Department of Transportation’s lane for setting fuel economy standards and where the EPA may have exceeded the authority Congress gave it.”

Ethanol interests also expressed frustration with the proposed rules and objected to the administration’s characterization of electric vehicles as being free of greenhouse gas pollution. They said the agency isn’t accounting for the energy-intensive nature of mineral mining and battery building, as well as the energy used to charge electric vehicles.

Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, noted that a majority of U.S. electricity today comes from fossil fuels. He said his group will be reaching out to members of Congress on what it calls a better approach — rather than what he called “carbon accounting gimmicks to create a de facto EV mandate.”

Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, an associate member of the national trade group, also accused the administration of putting its “thumb on the scale for EVs.”

And as an executive branch action, Wednesday’s rule proposal is vulnerable to being reversed by a future administration, much as former President Donald Trump’s regulators tried to undo EPA’s Obama-era regulations. Shaw predicted a continuation of “disjointed public policy” on emissions, characterized by “radical U turns” in policy until a consensus is reached.

But Thompson, from CapeDC Advisors, said he thinks the oil industry will “stay out of the crosshairs on this one” and let the auto industry lead the charge against the rule in the courts — assuming the carmakers do so.

The EPA rule is “more of an eyeroll than a source of consternation,” said one lobbyist, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

But another industry lobbyist, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the oil industry couldn’t just “leave it up to the autos because they have very different goals: The autos take issue with the speed with which they’re accelerating the energy transition, not the transition itself.”

Automobiles warn of a proposal that could be doomed to fail

Automakers are pouring more than $100 billion into the transition to electric, but they say the new EPA proposal goes too far too fast, especially considering the many challenges involving charging, minerals and the tax-credit restrictions.

One noteworthy feature of Wednesday’s rule rollout was what the automakers didn’t say. Officials from GM, Ford, Mercedes and the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the principal U.S. trade group for the auto industry, were present for Wednesday’s unveiling at EPA headquarters in Washington but didn’t speak.

The event had originally been expected to happen in Detroit, the industry’s home turf, a person familiar with the situation said. But the person, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, said automakers were concerned that holding it there could make it appear they were endorsing a proposal they hadn’t seen yet.

But people in the industry made it clear they don’t love the proposal.

Alliance for Automotive Innovation leader John Bozzella noted in a statement Wednesday that the EPA’s goal for electric vehicle adoption goes beyond Biden’s original target of having EVs make up 50 percent of new vehicle sales by 2030. He questioned how the agency could justify steamrolling that “carefully considered and data-driven goal,” especially since the industry and the administration had agreed on it just two years ago..

“To be clear, 50 percent was always a stretch goal and predicated on several conditions,” Bozzella said. Those conditions included the climate law’s incentives for manufacturers, which “have only just begun to be implemented,” and the $7,500 tax credits that the Treasury Department is now dramatically curtailing to meet Congress’ domestic sourcing requirements.

Nobody in the auto industry was threatening to go to court, but Bozzella also wasn’t endorsing the administration’s more ambitious new goal.

“The question isn’t can this be done, it’s how fast can it be done, and how fast will depend almost exclusively on having the right policies and market conditions in place,” he said.

Individual statements from some major carmakers were more noncommittal. Ford touted its advancement of electric vehicles and promised “strong coordinated action from the public and private sectors.” A GM spokesperson told POLITICO that policy staff is still going through the massive rule but that the company would likely submit comments on the rule.

Manufacturers exclusively invested in EVs, such as Rivian, applauded the EPA proposal.

The Zero Emission Transportation Association urged the administration to act swiftly to encourage more Americans to buy electric vehicles — and to ensure the industry is capable of providing them.

James Bikales and Alex Guillén contributed to this report.