Due to my position with Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, I get a lot of questions about the dirty residue from burning coal, or Alabama’s policies regarding solar energy for generating electricity. But there’s another area of public policy that is going to be vital for addressing the carbon emissions that are causing climate change: electrification of the transportation sector.
Alabama is well behind other states when it comes to the percentage of cars that are hybrid or fully-electric. For some auto buyers, the prices on electric vehicles just haven’t come down enough yet. For others, there are still some outdated ideas about EV performance. For the latter idea, it’s nothing a few test drives won’t solve. But for the former – the price – there’s a simple policy change that could help incentivize the purchase of these vehicles: a tax credit.
Our neighbors in Georgia recently passed a tax credit to encourage people to buy electric, and the Peach State quickly became one of the fastest growing markets for EVs. When the credit expired, the buying slowed down. Alabama could easily do the same thing, and extend a helping hand to a product looking to find space in the marketplace.
Fossil fuel burning vehicles have had plenty of government assistance over the years. The legislature, doing its annual budget work, could extend a tax cut to EV buyers without doing too much damage to needed government programs. Auto dealers would benefit from increased sales, while electric utilities would be happy to sell the fuel to charge up our transportation options.
The danger, though, is that Alabama might go the way of Mississippi, which recently put a tax hike on EV buyers. There’s already a plan underway to raise Alabama’s gasoline tax in the 2019 legislative session, and including EV buyers in that “fee increase” would be a huge policy mistake. Instead, lawmakers should incentivize Alabama drivers to get ahead of the curve and begin the decarbonization and electrification of our transportation sector. A tax credit on the purchase of an electric vehicle is a sensible place to start.
Stephen Stetson, Alabama-Georgia-Mississippi Beyond Coal CampaignSierra Club