David Gelles

speaker

265 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jan

David Gelles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Inside the U.S. reversal on climate change action · 28 Jan 2026 podcast

These designs and these plants and these supply chains require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

And what you've seen is that many American automakers, including Ford, just a couple years ago came out with a vehicle like the F-150 Lightning, right?

This was their classic pickup truck, upgraded to be an all-electric vehicle.

It was a marvel.

And now you see them walking back and essentially discontinuing it.

And while that may, in the short term...

be a boon for the internal combustion engine in the United States, there is no question that the rest of the world is moving in the opposite direction.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times when I was in Davos just last week in Switzerland or last year when I was in Belém, Brazil at the United Nations Climate Conference, I would call an Uber and

And what would arrive was a BYD Chinese electric vehicle that costs less than most American cars, comparably, and that performed exceptionally well, felt like a luxury vehicle, and was a fraction of the price for something that you might pay that was equivalent out of the United States.

So this is what is on automakers' minds as they look forward.

It's not just about fuel efficiency standards in the next five years.

It's about how are they going to be able to compete for market share in the decades ahead.

Well, late last year the Trump administration began the process of really drastically rolling back fuel economy requirements for new cars, new trucks, which is part of this broader pivot that we've mentioned away from cleaner technology more broadly.

But the actual implementation of this is going to take years.

And as with anything with these kind of standards, there could be additional lawsuits.

So I don't think it's fully settled, but the Trump administration is certainly trying to move it in that direction.

I think when you step back and try to understand which government agency has undergone the most drastic change over the past year, I would argue that the EPA, which was founded by President Nixon, has to be at the top of the list

From the moment that current administrator Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman, took it over, we've seen the EPA really fundamentally reshape its mission.

And this began very early in this most recent administration when the president and the EPA did just that.

They actually came out very early and said that the role of the EPA was no longer reducing pollution that was harmful to humans.

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