The Zero Emission Transportation Association

Can a lobbying group formed by utilities, EV manufacturers, and a ridehail company get us to zero emission vehicles faster?

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The Zero Emission Transportation Association

This week, we talk to Joe Britton, the executive director of the brand new Zero Emission Transportation Association, a group that launched last month with a simple but bold ambition: ensuring every new car and truck sold in the United States by 2030 is 100% zero emission. For cars, that’s significantly more ambitious than even California’s new policy. For trucks, it’s wildly more ambitious - most people assume zero emission trucks are much further down the road.

One interesting element of ZETA is the presence of utilities in a transportation lobbying association. Despite the potentially obvious upside for electric utilities in transportation electrification - a whole bunch of new electricity demand - many US utilities have dragged their feet on (or been outright hostile to) decarbonization.

It’s hard to find someone who knows more of the ins and outs of these issues than Joe. I was excited to sit down for an interview with him, condensed below:

Andrew Salzberg (AS): What are the goals of ZETA 2030?

Joe Britton (JB): The North Star goal for ZETA 2030 is that every vehicle sold in 2030 be an electric vehicle (EV). That's throughout all eight classes of vehicles. Some classes, it may be a bit more aspirational than others, but we feel like we need to put in place the policies to make that possible. 

Some states and countries have approached that problem with a gas powered car ban or a Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. We take more of a supply side approach. We want to put in place policies like consumer incentives and investments in charging infrastructure that will build up the market and incentivize domestic manufacturing. 

We think there are a lot of different reasons to get behind these kinds of policies. You might care about EVs because you're a consumer who's saving money on fuel and maintenance and service costs. You might see EVs as the answer if you care about climate change, or air pollution. Or you might see them as the right answer for your community because of economic development. Or it can be about restoring domestic American manufacturing, and making sure that we're competitive and that we're keeping up with foreign commercial interests. And so we think no matter what your interests are, there's a reason for you to be pro-EV. We think we can speak to both Republicans and Democrats about why this is a win for the country, and why it's good for their congressional district.

AS: Sounds like you see some hope for bipartisan cooperation on this topic. If you guys have an agenda for the new administration, for the next few years, what is it?

In all the models of decarbonization, the next couple of years are really, really important. And it's partly because the more fossil fuel powered vehicles that you put on the road now, the longer you'll have them on the road. If we're producing new gas powered cars in 2032, and 2033, that means we're burning gas in 2050 and beyond. So we think the next couple months are important for the next decade and the next decade is important for the next three decades. There's going to be legislative action in the next couple of months that will impact these issues. 

Congress is putting together the final touches on the appropriations process for this year in the lame duck session, and in the new year, there's going to be an economic recovery bill and maybe a big infrastructure push. And so I think there's a host of opportunities for members of Congress to find opportunities to accelerate the transition to EVs in a way that helps us decarbonize, serve consumers, and support domestic manufacturing. We're gonna have a constant presence in that conversation and be out there telling our story each and every day, sending a strong message that EVs are the right answer for the country.

The top two policies we’re looking for are a strong point of sale consumer incentive and charging infrastructure investment. 

How did ZETA come about? And how did you end up leading it?

The origin story for ZETA was that the electric vehicle sector didn't have a federal voice that reflected their strategic interests before Congress and the Administration. There are a lot of great EV advocates out there - Plug in America represents the car owners, and you've got the Alliance for Transportation Electrification that's focused on state regulatory policy. 

And then you've got groups like EDTA who have been pioneering this work for a long time, but have members who are legacy car makers that may be a bit more conflicted about accelerating the transition to EVs. But in reflecting purely electric vehicle interests, we are a little different. ZETA is 100% committed to accelerating the transition to electric vehicles and we want to move as quickly as possible. 

To your second question, this was not my intentional path. I spent 16 years working in the US Senate. I knew the EV community because my former boss, Senator Martin Heinrich, was the lead democrat on the 30D consumer incentive tax credit. And so I got to know those folks. And after I was out of the Senate maybe six months, a few of them came to me and said, "Hey, do you want to help us get a group set up?" And I said, "Of course." And I started talking to a host of folks in my network and throughout the sector and everyone was really supportive of the idea.  Then all of a sudden, we've got 15 or 20 members and are growing quickly, and I looked around and I was the executive director. I truly enjoy the work and it's been an honor to have that kind of response. Now we've grown up to 35 members and counting. Right now, scaling is our biggest challenge because there's just a lot of opportunity and we want to leave everything out on the field. And so we're going to be expanding and hiring. 

Some of the founding members of ZETA 2030 are electric utilities. There's always been hope that utilities would be excited about electrification as a generator of new electric power demand. But there's also been a lot of well documented cases of utilities slowing decarbonization efforts and engaging in outright climate denial. How do you think about the role of utilities in transport decarbonization?

I think utilities have to be a key partner in transport decarbonization. This transition is literally swapping electrons for gasoline, and there's an obvious upside for utilities there. They also have to have an important role in deploying the charging infrastructure. When you think about load and management of the grid, they have to be part of that solution, because they're the ones that are pulling it all together. And so for us, we've had a lot of utility interest because I think they see both the value of decarbonization and transitioning to EVs. But they're also interested in a future where they are managing the grid in a smarter way. There's a lot of innovation that's going to be happening, like vehicle to grid, particularly for fleets. And so I think the more that you've got the utilities at the table and partnering to help accelerate the transition, the better.

You talk a lot about vehicles like cars and trucks, but there’s a whole new set of electric vehicles on the market: e-scooters, e-bikes, automated delivery vehicles. Are those outside your scope?

So again, the response since our launch has just been really overwhelming. We've had folks come to us and urge us to consider additional workstreams, from scooters, to bikes, to ships, to airplanes, to tractors, to forklifts. In the short run, in particular the first 100 days of the transition, we want to focus on more 'traditional' vehicles. But increasingly, it just makes sense to be thinking about a whole suite of mobility options, and how you can, better serve consumers, create jobs, and decarbonize, especially in urban settings.

I think a lot of people spend so much of their time in the electric vehicle world they’re convinced this transition is inevitable. But, obviously, EV sales are still only about 2% of US passenger vehicle sales. So what does your polling tell us know about the attitude towards EVs among Americans? 

I think that there's a certain stigma with EVs that still needs to be broken down. That's part of what innovation is helping to achieve. You've got Lordstown creating the endurance pickup. They took over an old Chevy Cruze plant in Lordstown, Ohio, so they're telling a story of domestic manufacturing and rejuvenation for a community there. It's a workhorse pickup that is going to be for commercial fleets. You're not asking construction sites to run Nissan LEAFs. They'll be able to get a big pickup that is serving their needs. That is going to open some cultural doors. 

You've also got Rivian selling an 'adventure pickup' for wilderness outdoor recreation types. So I think the more vehicles that are on the market, the more it solves for some of those public perception problems. The most common challenge we usually talk about - range anxiety - is also starting to fade. If you look at where some of the range is for these new vehicles, it's just as much range as anybody would have if they filled up their gas tank. So, those are all things that technology is solving, but also, behavioral change just takes a little time, but the products are going to solve those things. You can't force people into it.

One of the criticisms of EVs is that they're just for wealthy people. So do you think at all about broadening access to this new technology?

Yes, we do a lot. Groups like EV noire are doing great work to expand the EV landscape.  The key is engagement and you have to be asking the right questions when you're deploying charging infrastructure for example and planning for what's right for that community. So I think you need to be present and actually listen to people, and that is critical to reflect the community's needs. 

I also think there are opportunities to broaden the EV market and bring down costs by unlocking the used car market. The number of used car sales to new car sales in the US is around 2:1, and that obviously means not everybody is in the market for a new car. And so we shouldn't set up this expectation that going electric means you've got to be able to afford a new car.

But the other thing that we need to do is focus on the local air pollution benefits of this transition. When you talk about emissions, not every community is equal. Black and brown communities, for example, breathe in 66% more transportation-based air pollution than other communities. We ought to be more deliberate, intentional and well-funded in efforts targeted in those areas to deploy more medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles to improve public health. Expanding DERA and CMAQ are obvious places to start, but there is a lot more that we can and should do.  We’ll be rolling out our full policy agenda soon.

New & Worth a Read

• A twist on the typical infrastructure proposal from T4A and Third Way: $10 Billion to tear highways down.

• Many look to transit expansion as a way to lower US transport emissions, but a big obstacle is cost. It’s unreasonably expensive to build US transit compared to peers in Europe. Why? Related: mass transit in the US is facing an existential crisis. 

• What can we learn from North America’s largest electric bus fleet? 

• This newsletter loves Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). Regulatory changes on the west coast are opening up opportunities for more - good news.

• The UK is a world leader on climate policy, and one aspect of that is the Citizens Climate Committee. They just released their carbon sixth budget, and they dive deep on surface transport. 

• We’re still far from ‘on track’ to meet Paris climate accord goals.

• How did renewables become so cheap so fast? 

• The UK launches a new interactive CO2 calculator, named after a hero of this newsletter, David Mackay. 

• Fully Charged stops at a new all EV ‘gas’ station

• New interest in hydrogen to decarbonize aviation.

• News out of Denmark highlights that when Europeans talk about incentivizing EVs, they talk about taxing gasoline cars. In North America, we mostly talk about subsidizing electric ones. 

• Japan is banning purely gasoline powered cars after 2030, though the carbon intensity of Japan’s electric grid will mute the benefit of that transition. Related: gasoline car bans show that market forces aren’t enough.

• There’s a ‘clean tech’ or ‘climate tech’ boom going on, with lots of money focused on mobility. How do we learn the lessons of the last clean tech bust? 

• News on the Biden admin:

  • How EDF thinks the next admin should decarbonize transportation.

  • More on Biden’s EV charging infrastructure proposals.

  • Pete Buttigieg for transportation secretary? Polly Trottenberg for transportation secretary? 

• There’s been a lot of fevered twitter debate around the “electric vehicles vs ban cars” debate, something I wrote about earlier this year. See tweets (and replies) here & here.

• Zero emission zones for freight, don’t wait.

• Last week I wrote about Quebec’s climate plan. This week, Montreal outlined a plan that includes a downtown zero emission vehicle zone by 2030.

• Last but not least: it’s not really decarbonization news, but weird enough that it belongs here: even though NYC’s subway is not open for passengers overnight, the trains are still running 24 hours a day.

Till Next Time,

Andrew