Pete Buttigieg: EV incentives needed or 'warming happens just a little quicker and a few more people die'

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says electric vehicles should be 'quickly mainstreamed'

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday that electric vehicles need to be "quickly mainstreamed" because lower-income people who struggle to pay for gas would benefit from them the most. 

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday that electric vehicles need to be "quickly mainstreamed" because lower-income Americans would benefit from them the most. 

"There is now an estimate that says it’s literally — and this is not inflation, it’s four times the cost because of the number of folks that are going to benefit from it, and they’re taking advantage of it, the good news is they’re taking advantage of it. The bad news is the math is going to be a lot more expensive, which raises the question of actually whether the incentives needed to be as high as they are," CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin said. 

Buttigieg replied that there had to be incentives that encouraged U.S.-based manufacturers to produce electric vehicles so that the electric revolution is "made in America." He also said it was important that it happens quickly so that the U.S. "can meet our climate goals."

"Like any early technology, the early adopters of electric vehicles were people with a lot of means, a lot of resources. But this is something that needs to get quickly mainstreamed, especially when you consider that the Americans who stand the most to benefit from having an EV are lower income Americans paying a higher share of their family budget on gas prices," he added. 

Pete Buttigieg joins CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday to discuss President Biden's infrastructure plans.  (Screenshot/CNBC/SqawkBox)

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Sorkin followed up about the overall trend towards electric vehicles in the U.S. and asked if the administration was going to look back in four years and believe that the incentives were too large given that people were already moving towards electric vehicles.

"So like if we didn’t care whether the EV revolution was going to be led by China, if we didn’t care whether or not U.S. manufacturers with high labor standards were going to be at the cutting edge, then I guess we could have not bothered with the incentives and see how that played out, if we didn’t care about the pace of it, right? And if we said, look, these will happen sooner or later, if these climate wins come a few years later and that warming happens just a little quicker and a few more people die because of that, that’s why we have policy interventions," Buttigieg said. 

President Biden touted electric vehicle tax credits in a Twitter post on Monday that included a photo of him posing in a GMC Hummer EV

President Biden walks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2023, for a short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, and then on to New York.  (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

A GMC Hummer EV costs anywhere between $87,000 and $110,000 and does not qualify for the tax credit because SUVs and trucks must not exceed a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $80,000, according to the Internal Revenue Service. 

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"On my watch, the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified," Biden tweeted on Monday. "And now, through a tax credit, you can get up to $7,500 on a new electric vehicle."

The Biden administration recently awarded $1.2 billion in grant funding to different transportation-related projects across the U.S.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaks at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) (Associated Press)

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The administration based their grant funding decisions in part on the environmental and equity goals of the project. 

The law funding these projects, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, requires officials to consider whether the project benefits a "historically disadvantaged community or population." 

The law also requires officials to consider the project's construction and equipment needed and whether it would demonstrate "reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."