Dem VP pick Walz is ‘climate champion,’ unlike Musk-backed GOP EV haters

Democratic U.S. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced her VP pick this week in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has recently passed laws supporting Minnesota’s transition to carbon-free power and lower tailpipe emissions.

However, the CEO of the nation’s largest EV company, whose personal and corporate mission is supposedly to ensure a transition to sustainable transport, is still backing a ticket that routinely lies about EVs and wants to subsidize polluting gas vehicles.

It has been a busy couple days learning about Tim Walz, the midwest governor and former soldier, schoolteacher and congressman who has now been elevated to the status of Vice Presidential nominee as Kamala Harris’ running-mate.

There are many pieces covering his background and positions, but we here at Electrek are primarily interested in candidates’ positions on the things we cover – EVs, clean energy, and climate change.

And since we covered the last VP pick and his ridiculous anti-EV stance, it only makes sense to cover this VP pick and his comparatively glowing stance on EVs and clean energy. So this article will look into the policy and policy-related statements of the new VP pick that are relevant to EVs and green energy, and how they relate to those of the republican ticket.

Walz signed 100% clean energy by 2040 into law

Walz undertook a couple of very notable actions in this respect as Governor of Minnesota.

With a narrow majority in the Minnesota legislature, Democrats passed and Walz signed a law requiring 100% of Minnesota’s electricity generation to come from carbon-free energy sources (such as wind, water, solar, and nuclear) by 2040.

This is considered quite an ambitious target – only a few states (New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Oregon, and Rhode Island) plan to make the shift by then. The timeline is even faster than California’s 2045 target, despite that state typically being a leader in these sorts of things.

In order to meet this timeline, Walz worked on streamlining permitting reform, removing red tape from new clean energy projects. This is a hot-button topic these days that gets a lot of mention even from republicans – though they tend to support adding more red tape to make clean energy permitting harder, rather than easier.

But much more action was taken during his time in Minnesota than we’ve covered here. All in all, Walz says that he and the Minnesota Legislature passed 40 climate initiatives just in the 2023 legislative session alone.

Walz helped make EVs cheaper, cars cleaner

On EVs, Minnesota passed a $2,500 rebate for new EVs, or $600 for used ones, under Walz’s tenure as governor. This meant Minnesota joined a handful of states that have their own EV rebates, in addition to the $7,500 federal credit from the Inflation Reduction Act – and the used EV rebate is notable too, as even fewer states have a used credit.

Walz also adopted stronger tailpipe standards, ensuring tighter emissions requirements than those in place from the federal government. This is allowed, as long as the state standards are tighter than the EPA’s.

These are known as “Section 177” states, based on the section of the Clean Air Act that this state waiver is mentioned in, and Minnesota joined this group under Walz in 2021. Walz also successfully fought back against an auto dealer attempt to stop these standards.

“Minnesotans certainly know that old adage, ‘You need to skate where the puck is going to be. The puck is going to be in EV vehicles, and that is irrefutable.”

Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota

This means cars sold in Minnesota will put out less pollution overall, and be more efficient, saving Minnesotans money both on fueling and health costs of pollution. In order to meet these higher standards, automakers will have to sell a higher percentage of EVs in the state than they would otherwise – and it means an end to new gas car sales by 2035 in the state as well.

Walz supported by environmental organizations

These actions and others have resulted in a chorus of environmental organizations speaking out in favor of his VP candidacy:

• Ben Jealous of the Sierra Club said “the Harris-Walz ticket is one that understands the fight before us”
• Bill Holland of the League of Conservation Voters said “we could not be more excited about Governor Walz’s leadership on climate”
• Al Gore said Walz “is a proven leader on climate and knows the issue inside and out.”
• California Environmental Voters declared him a “climate champion” (as did the New York Times)

In addition to all of this, Walz is just the VP pick, alongside current US Vice President Kamala Harris who is running at the top of the ticket. And her administration’s accomplishments on EVs and climate have been significant.

The Biden-Harris administration has made several pro-environment moves, including better emissions regulations, supporting both light- and medium/heavy-duty EVs and EV chargers, regulations that led to the streamlining of EV charging via industry-wide NACS adoption, and most of all, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act which is the most significant single climate bill ever passed by any country in the world (though the administration also implemented EV tariffs which are not the right answer – but it’s an answer Trump also favors).

Stark contrast with the Trump-Vance ticket

In contrast, Donald Trump, convicted felon and three-time republican nominee for President, routinely shows a lack of understanding of electric vehicles and the policy surrounding them, has committed to helping the oil industry and, via his running-mate, to harming EVs specifically.

Mr. Trump routinely makes electric vehicles a feature of his speeches, often in his characteristic style of unfocused, rambling word association. He has claimed that he will end an EV mandate that doesn’t exist, he has repeatedly lied about progress on EV charger installations, and then there was whatever this is about batteries and shark attacks.

Read More: Trump says he’ll end the EV mandate. The only problem: there isn’t one.

He even went so far as to ask for $1 billion in bribes from the oil industry in order to harm EVs and clean air, in addition to calling EVs a “hoax” – a word that he has also repeatedly wrongly used to describe the science of climate change.

And finally, he said that you, dear reader of this EV-focused website, should “ROT IN HELL” for your support of EVs.

But we don’t have to just look at speeches, public statements or his rarely-kept promises, we can look at what happened the last time Mr. Trump found himself in the Oval Office. During that period, the EPA, run by oil and coal stooges Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler, undertook several initiatives to increase pollution from both vehicles and power plants.

In 2012, state standards had finally been harmonized with the EPA by the Obama-Biden administration, leading to more regulatory certainty for automakers. Automakers nevertheless couldn’t help themselves and lobbied to torpedo the regulations, which Trump’s EPA did – even though EPA’s own analysis showed that this move would kill people and cost more money.

Later, automakers complained about the change they had asked for. The standards are still not harmonized (though they’re close), leading to continued consternation among automakers as a result of the Trump EPA’s meddling.

Trump’s EPA attempted to end the stronger state emissions waiver that Walz later signed Minnesota on to. Thankfully, the states won that fight, but it’s likely that a Trump EPA would try to do the same again. After all, Project 2025, a dystopian plan for action produced by the serial liars at the Heritage Foundation that Trump endorsed in 2022, calls for eliminating that waiver.

The Trump EPA also proposed what has been called a “Dirty Power Plan” to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, and judges appointed by Trump said that the EPA can’t regulate greenhouse emissions (even though the Clean Air Act tells them to) and wrote one of the dumbest opinions in a long time which will have the effect of replacing scientists with untrained judges when evaluating complex scientific and regulatory questions.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Mr. Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance (who previously called Trump “America’s Hitler”) proposed a bill that would make electric cars more expensive and give hundreds of billions of dollars to gas guzzlers – and would hand more of an EV manufacturing lead to China.

So from the perspective of those who like clean air, energy efficiency, and new car technology like EVs, there certainly seems to be a clear choice between these candidates. And there’s also quite a difference on climate change, the most important challenge that humanity has ever faced – one ticket will put in some effort to solve it, the other will make it worse.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk still siding against EVs and environment

Given all of that, it sure does seem strange that the person in America who is most tied to the concept of electric cars would support the latter group of anti-EV candidates, rather than the pro-EV ones.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently committed $180 million to these anti-EV and anti-environment candidates, despite his supposed mission to accelerate sustainable transport.

In the past, Musk departed Trump’s “advisory council” after Trump tried to pull out of the Paris Agreement,  rightly recognizing that “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

But now, he states that he “fully endorses” that same anti-environment candidate, which is already damaging Tesla’s sales as buyers recognize his violations of Tesla’s mission. As a result of Musk’s support, Trump has said he has “no choice” but to support EVs, once again showing his openness to bribery, but yet he still continues to repeat the same lies about EVs in his speeches. And Project 2025 still includes long sections suggesting regulatory changes that would harm EVs, increase fuel costs and worsen climate change.

As for Walz, Musk has not yet commented specifically on his addition to the ticket, but did respond to a number of tweets – one seemingly accusing Walz of being Somalian, one calling an order Walz signed to ensure LGBTQ Minnesotans have access to healthcare “unconscionable,” and one opposing Walz’s measures to reduce misinformation and hate speech.

Musk has not yet made any mention of Walz’s EV or climate policies, despite those supposedly being central to his and his company’s goals.

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