A majority of Americans are unwilling to purchase an EV or install solar panels in their home despite the Biden administration’s push to provide financial incentivizes for green energy technologies, an Associated Press poll found.
The Democrats’ $386 billion climate bill, which President Joe Biden signed into law in August, will spend $161 billion on “clean electricity” tax credits and $36 billion on EV tax credits. [bold, links added]
Despite this, a majority of Americans are unwilling to purchase electric cars or solar panels, according to an AP and University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center poll published Tuesday.
Roughly 69% of those polled said that they were not very likely to buy an electric car (EV) and only 9% said that they were extremely likely to buy an EV.
A majority of respondents (64%) also indicated that they were unwilling to purchase solar panels and only one out of every ten people surveyed claimed that they were very likely to do so.
Although more Democrats said that they were more likely to buy solar panels and EVs than Republicans, 60% of Democrats said that they were extremely unlikely to buy an EV and another 58% said that they were not likely to install solar panels in their homes, according to the poll.
Only 10% of Democrats responded that they were extremely likely to buy solar panels and 12% said that they were likely to purchase an EV.
Biden is instituting climate-focused policies to get the country to cut carbon emissions by half of what they were in 2005 by 2030.
It can cost between $12,000 and $30,000 to install a standard six-kilowatt household solar panel system, according to Modernize, a home improvement website, while the average price of a new electric car is $66,000, according to Kelley Blue Book, a vehicle valuation and automotive research company.
The Democrats’ climate bill offers individuals who buy a new EV a $7,500 per vehicle tax credit.
Read more at Daily Caller
I’m a climate realist and even among Republicans I’m a conservative. Yet, I wouldn’t mind owning an electric car. I would never try a long trip but it could be useful for local commuting. However, electric cars cost about ten times what our family pays for the vehicles that we typically drive for 100,000 miles. A big obstacle to owning an EV is affordability.
Yeah, EVs are a toy of the upper and upper-middle class. I live in an upper-middle class neighborhood in a SE suburb of Denver. Seeing a fair number of EVs (mostly Teslas) around but see few of them in Denver proper where most cars are parked on the city streets. But even here it’s less than 10% of the cars are EVs.
Live in a hurricane-prone area. I don’t want solar panels on any house I live in. Just something else you have to repair/replace after a wind event.
I live outside Denver where we do get lots of sunshine so there are a number of homes with panels on them. But then our average home prices are at or over $1M. I think most do it to show they are “green” rather than that they need to save on their utility bills.
We refuse to buy Biden,s Snake Oil so he should try and sell Sunlamps in the Sahara Desert
How many people buy an EV, charge it exclusively with their own solar panels and waive the subsidies?
That would be walking the talk. They would also need to be willing to walk, a lot.