Tesla, which produces sexy, scary-fast and very pricey battery-powered cars, has a handy website guide to the “incentives” its customers may claim.
Buying a Tesla earns one a $7,500 federal income tax credit, plus rebates and credits from states, including California, which offers a “$2,500 rebate and carpool lane access” to electric car owners.
Obviously, those who can afford Teslas are a very small portion of the state’s residents. Obviously, too, the $10,000 rebates may not be major factors in their decisions to buy.
But it illustrates a dirty little secret of the wide array of tax credits, rebates and other “incentives” that federal and state governments have offered in the name of reducing emissions of carbon and other pollutants: They mostly go to the affluent.
That’s not just a hunch. It’s revealed in research from the University of California’s prestigious Haas School of Business Energy Institute, whose new report on the “distributional effects of U.S. clean energy tax credits” is co-authored by Severin Borenstein, the state’s leading energy authority.
