Sure it was approached not in the way it had to be. It requires a long-term commitment - longer than duration of one administration. And it requires actual mandates, like we do in EU. Simply put, there are norms of how many electric cars should be sold and on the road in every country every year, and countries face steep fines if they don't. There is no way to object apart from leaving the EU which means instant economic and social death. So things move along quite well here. It might look like socialism, but hell yeah, if it works, why not?
U.S. needs to have state by state mandates which are actually mandatory and provide irrevocable mechanisms to maintain them regardless of administration in power, it needs high tax on gas (make it more expensive than in EU - maybe $10/gallon? because people make more), and ban or extreme high taxes on large cars, especially large gas cars. That progressively increase as share of EVs increase.
Median age of a new car buyer is 53. These people are not going to voluntarily change. They need to be forced to.
The American system of government has fairly onerous limits on federal power. We have been fairly clever at subverting those limits, but setting state by state mandates for EVs on the road doesn’t sound like an easy lift to me.
Then it is bound to fail and will only happen in a very uncomfortable, to say the least, manner where fuel for gas cars will have to be cut off due to global warming. U.S. does not exist in a vacuum and no country will be able to just say "nah" when it's time to go net zero and everyone else did it already.
Time to get things more centralised, more organised, more orderly, more long-term. Somehow when an itemised, step by step, detailed plan with minute regulatory details to enforce it, that spans 30+ years, is adopted in EU, no one laughs at it, people know it will work because there are clean cut mechanisms of enforcement that go above national level (and politics in European Parliament isn't at all populist unlike national level one).
U.S. needs to have state by state mandates which are actually mandatory and provide irrevocable mechanisms to maintain them regardless of administration in power, it needs high tax on gas (make it more expensive than in EU - maybe $10/gallon? because people make more), and ban or extreme high taxes on large cars, especially large gas cars. That progressively increase as share of EVs increase.
Median age of a new car buyer is 53. These people are not going to voluntarily change. They need to be forced to.