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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. This Thursday is Earth Day, April 22nd. All this week, we'll be doing segments on this show related to climate science and climate policy and we'll begin right now with the question, what would it take to totally convert from gasoline powered to electric cars? Now, if that sounds like a pie in the sky idea, it's something that president Biden is actually talking about.

President Biden: Creating good-paying jobs by leading in the world and the manufacturing and export of clean electric cars and trucks. We're going to provide tax incentives and point of sale rebates to help all American families afford clean vehicles of future. The federal government owns an enormous fleet of vehicles which are going to be transitioned to clean electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles right here in the United States of America by American workers with American product.

Brian: President Biden on March 31st. Joining me now to talk about the role of electric vehicles and meeting the US climate goals, President Biden's proposed boost to the industry and his infrastructure plan and the practicalities of shifting from gas powered vehicles to electric ones is Steven Mufson, business of climate change reporter at the Washington Post. Stephen, thanks so much for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC.

Steven Mufson: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Brian: What's the president's vision? I've seen the number 500,000 charging stations. That would be more charging stations than we currently have gas stations in the United States.

Steven Mufson: Yes, it would. I think that this is part of his infrastructure plan and he's taking aim at the anxiety that people say they have at driving long distances in an electric vehicle. That's why a lot of people say they don't want to buy an electric vehicle and he's trying to ease that anxiety, range anxiety.

Brian: Let's about that phrase. Tell us how much range anxiety, there's a vocabulary term for the day, is limiting the sales of electric vehicles that are currently on the market and really viable and good.

Steven Mufson: I think that the vehicles, their upper range is around 200 miles for a charge up. Of course you lose some of that in the cold weather, and then of course GM has had some battery problems. It's learning to scale, the maximum amounts of people charging their car even more. Things aren't great on the long-distance end of things but most people don't drive that far every day. Something like three-quarters of Americans drive 20 miles or less to bracelet commuting. For those people, there's really no need to be anxious. For those people, it's really a question of convenience.

Can I get the charging station when I want it? How long is it going to take to recharge the car? Am I doing that in five minutes like I used to do my gasoline powered car, or am I going to have to go shopping for half an hour first?

Brian: How long does it take to recharge an electric car?

Steven Mufson: It depends. There are fast charging stations and there are slower charging stations. The faster ones can give you, I think, around 80% inn half an hour or so, but if you were plugging it into something in your house and there are special sockets for this, it would still take you overnight.

Brian: Listeners, wondering if anyone out there is on the fence about buying an electric vehicle because of range anxiety, or for any other reason. What kind of cost-benefit analysis are you doing in terms of dollars, in terms of time, whatever? 646-435-7280. For those of you who already own electric vehicles, we would love to hear from you. You're probably in love with your vehicle and you want to convince others to get one just like yours. You can make that case, 646-435-7280, or if you're more ambivalent and you want to talk about the pros and cons, that's fine too. 646-435-7280 for Steven Mufson, business of climate change reporter at the Washington Post.

I mentioned the 500,000 charging stations that the president would like to see in this country and it's by 2030. That's actually pretty fast. Can we get there? What's involved in getting there that quickly?

Steven Mufson: It's a pretty fundamental transition and I think the companies really are only thinking about it because they see climate change as an existential threat. What it takes is billions and billions of dollars in investment and overhauling factories. I think Ford, as I recall, is in the middle of investing well over $20 billion dollars. GM is going to be closer to $30 billion. We're talking about a lot of money, and that's just the big automobile companies. That doesn't include all the investments that's going into new battery factories and some of the suppliers who make the things that go into batteries.

We're talking about a lot of money and we're talking about a relatively short period of time. It's taken Prius ages to get a tiny piece of the car market. We're talking about changing so that we sell 17 million cars a year in the United States. That's just an awesome number and making all of them electric vehicles is going to be a challenge.

Brian: Something like a Prius is a hybrid vehicle, so people can run it on gasoline when charging for as long as it takes to charge is not convenient enough. Is that the vision for 2030? Confirm if I'm remembering this right, I think I saw that General Motors says it's going to stop making gasoline-powered vehicles altogether, General Motors, by 2030.

Steven Mufson: Yes, was it 2030 or was it 2035?

Brian: Maybe it was. You would know better.

Steven Mufson: Either way, it's a huge task. If you read the fine print, you'll notice that they say that's their aspiration. I'm not sure whether they're trying to leave themselves a little wiggle room there, but it's important. I tell you why it's important, is because if the entire economy is going to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, automobile companies need to stop selling gasoline-powered cars by 2035, because we're all keeping our automobiles for 10, 15 years. We really need to think ahead if you're in the automobile business.

Brian: Joining us now briefly to discuss his experience with driving an electric vehicle in Manhattan is Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish and his newest, The Climate Diet: 50 Simple Ways to Trim Your Carbon Footprint. Hi Paul, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Paul Greenberg: Hi Brian, nice to be here.

Brian: I see the last March Nissan agreed to lend you a fully electric LEAF, the Nissan LEAF SL, for two weeks and you came into the two weeks with some "range anxiety" of your own. How did it go?

Paul Greenberg: I did. I had range anxiety, meaning that I was worried that I would run out of charge but I have to say, two weeks I was, this is for an article I was writing for Curb, I did not experience a huge problem with charging. Although there's the usual WTF Gotham taking you to the parking garages where a lot of these charging stations are, are inside private parking garages, and they want to charge you all this money on top of it. Since I'm a freelance writer, I was able to find a pretty easy charge, like at the Wholefoods and Iguanas, for example.

Overall I found the experience very pleasant to have an electric vehicle, but I do have really serious concerns about what we want the city of the future to have. Do we want it to just replace all the gas cars with electric cars? As I think probably your guests may have suggested, it's probably much more effective to get to net zero for cities if we really start thinking about other kinds of transportation, particularly bicycles.

Brian: Did your experience with the Nissan LEAF make you think that Biden can accomplish this goal as quickly as he wants to or give you more doubts?

Paul Greenberg: The Nissan guy said to me that my range anxiety would change to range confidence. I have to say that it really did and I actually do think it's very possible to do. What's interesting is that charging stations seem to be getting paired together with retail. The idea is that, you charge while you shop, you come out, you'll be all fully charged and then you'll be able to do go about your business. It all seemed conceivable to me, but again, I think about all this infrastructure package stuff that's going on. I had a piece in The Times last week about this.

If we're going to start ordering things online more often, we're not going to be commuting as much, do we want to have as many vehicles on the road in the future, and they're all electric, or do we want to really direct this electric vehicle stuff towards the public sector, have all public vehicles be electric and really focus on that?

Just look at the sheer amount of parking in New York City that's devoted to vehicles. Right now, 480 million square feet is devoted to parking. That's 12 Central Parks that New York could have back if we didn't have as many vehicles on the street.

Brian: Cathy in Brooklyn, has a question that maybe Paul, you'd be the best to answer, so hang around. Cathy, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Cathy: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I actually commute most of the time to Manhattan, which is about 75 miles. I would buy an electric car tomorrow but I work in film and TV, so my hours are very off. Finding, as was just described, available charging that's not in a parking garage, because I do not have a big budget. Having to pay to charge the car in a parking garage is challenging. I went on both the city website and ConEd to try to find public charging stations and found it more complicated than I thought. It was just very frustrating. I do want to know when we are getting-- Pardon?

Brian: Go ahead Cathy, finish your question. Let her finish. Go ahead, Cathy.

Cathy: I just want to know when and how we would find out about public charging stations other than for retail, and what the timeframe is on that? I do have range anxiety because I can't get into the city and not charge to get back.

Paul Greenberg: First of all, the electric vehicles today actually have quite a bit of range. The Nissan LEAF, which is the bottom of the line vehicle, has 250 miles of range. It's actually able to get to the end of Long Island and back on a single charge. That is fully possible. If you want to shop around, there's an app called PlugShare and that lists all the chargers that are currently available, and some of them are in garages. As I say, there are chargers available, like at a Wholefoods, at retail places. Some of them are these super fast chargers, which will allow you get it charged pretty quickly.

I certainly have to say, to me the choice isn't between electric and internal combustion for my next car. The choice is car at all, or just a bike? I actually think that the range is there, even with the limited infrastructure that we have now, I think you can actually fairly confidently own an electric vehicle, even if you're a commuter.

Brian: What does a typical garage charge to charge?

Paul Greenberg: From what I could understand, the ones that had charging stations try to stick you with the parking fee, in addition to the charging time. The charging time really, by the way, should only end up costing you less than a buck a gallon equivalent in electric charge. When I talk to this charging network called EVgo, which is one of the bigger charging networks, what they're proposing is that they're going to be QR codes that private garages will be able to scan your QR code, the bar in the parking garage will go up, you'll charge and you'll get out without getting stuck with that parking fee.

Brian, as a New Yorker, do you really think the garages are going to go for that? I hope they do, but I think that that's going to be an obstacle, is trying to get those folks on board.

Brian: Mouke, in Washington DC, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mouke.

Mouke: Hi, Brian, I love this show. Thank you so much. My question for Steven is the grid is cleaner in different parts of the country. In some parts there's a lot of coal, other parts it's more renewables. I was wondering, in your reporting, have you found that there's any idea as to where these charging stations will be? To care about climate change, shouldn't we be putting these charging stations in cleaner places? Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you very much. He told our screener that part of his question was that the grid is supplied by coal, the electric grid. Isn't that bad? How much of a net positive for the climate are electric vehicles versus gasoline power?

Steven Mufson: It's a great question and it depends on where you are. Some parts of the country have more coal supplying the grid than others. Most importantly, in order to make this worthwhile, we really need to green the grid. I think that changing the nature of the automobile fleet must go hand in hand with changing the way we get our electric power. In some places and on some days, especially in the Great Plains, 100% of the electric grid output has been from renewable. So certain parts of the country are already there. We have a long way to go to get the whole rest of the country there too.

Paul Greenberg: Can I break in here too and just say one thing which is that, EVgo which is the charging network that I use fairly often, they've pledged to only source their electricity from renewables. I don't know if that's going to truly the case, but that's what they're saying.

Brian: I see that a caller, Hayim in Liquid is starting an EV charging station company. Hayim, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in. Tell us real quick. How would this work?

Hayim: Hi, Brian, thank you for taking my call, first of all. I've been looking around in the industry as a whole already for over a year, and I found that most of the EV charging networks require the drivers to have an app. If you're a driver, you're going to have to have multiple apps because it depends on where your nearest station is. It could be from either EVgo, Blink, et cetera. I came up with this concept to have charging stations that the driver can just put a credit card to it without needing any apps or anything, they could just put a credit card and pay for the charging. Currently, there's only one manufacturer manufacturing it and we hope to start selling it very soon.

Brian: We're going to run out of time in the show, so forgive me. Does your business model include how much a charge would cost? Are you up to that?

Hayim: Yes. Another concept here is that the host would actually own the machine, meaning the property owner would own the machine instead of having the network owning the machine and charging whatever they choose. The host would set that price. Currently it's around $4 and hour is what I find the going rate.

Brian: Hayim, I'm going to have to leave it there, I apologize. Steven, can you sneak in one last answer in literally 15 seconds? Tesla has its own 20,000 plus superchargers, but other cars need different things. How do we fuse that? 15 seconds literally.

Steven Mufson: If we can figure out how to pay for food that we take out in all different restaurants with all different apps, and we all managed to figure that out, I think we can figure this out too.

Brian: There we go with Stephen Mufson, business of climate change reporter at the Washington Post and Paul Greenberg, author of The Climate Diet, 50 Simple Ways to Trim your Carbon Footprint. Thank you both very much. Tune in tomorrow, when we will continue our climate week series with a look at solar energy in the city.

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