Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: May 29, 2025
Electric cars taking off worldwide!
Electric cars are on track to rise to over 25% of total new car sales worldwide in 2025.
Tell the Senate not to kill the IRA’s clean energy and EV tax credits!
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Reasons For Hope
A new International Energy Agency report quantifies the accelerating global growth of electric vehicles. In 2024, over 20% of all new cars sold worldwide were either plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) or fully electric (EVs), and that’s on track to rise to over 25% in 2025.
China is currently far and away the leader in this sector: of the over 17 million EVs and PHEVs sold worldwide in 2024, over 11 million were sold within China itself — and that’s not counting exports to other countries’ fast-growing clean car markets.
Electric cars are also getting cheaper very fast. BYD, a Chinese company that’s currently the world’s leading EV company, announced a new wave of price reductions for its electric cars in late May 2025. Their cheapest model, the all-electric BYD Seagull hatchback, now costs just $7,780 in China.
In the 2020s, the United States has been endeavoring to build up its own electric car manufacturing to keep its automakers globally competitive in the dawning EV era. The Inflation Reduction Act’s EV-related tax credits have sparked a domestic manufacturing renaissance, with ten new EV factories planned to come online across the nation in 2025. Domestic EV-making is creating good-paying skill-building U.S. manufacturing jobs while reducing air pollution and economically revitalizing entire regions of the country’s neglected heartland!
But now, all of this progress on American electric car competitiveness is at risk. The federal government is currently debating whether to kneecap its own domestic electrotech industries, with the House Republican budget proposal essentially repealing the 45X advanced manufacturing credit that provides critical support for American battery-making and the range of tax credits that incentivize U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing and sales.
This budget, as it stands, is absolutely terrible for America’s industry, economy, and security. A recent report from the Energy Innovation think tank has calculated that this proposed reconciliation bill’s attacks on clean energy would decrease U.S. GDP by $1.1 trillion through 2034! This would be a world-historical act of self-sabotage and must not be allowed to pass in the Senate. Responding to China’s EV innovations with an attack on America’s own EV manufacturing would be as if we had responded to the USSR’s Sputnik launch by destroying our own rockets instead of founding NASA. The Senate absolutely must protect the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy and EV tax credits.