President Biden’s latest push for electric vehicles, or EVs, is reminiscent of a soliloquy from Don Quixote: short on facts, long on rhetoric and full of unrealistic expectations. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Biden’s policy mistakes go beyond fiction to a reality that limits consumers to cars that are unaffordable and unwanted.
Like Don Quixote tilting at harmless windmills he thinks are giants, Mr. Biden is attacking America’s energy and auto industry for daring to use fossil fuels. And while Don Quixote went from quest to quest trying to free imaginary prisoners, Mr. Biden is determined to free Americans from the imaginary captivity of their reliable, safe, flexible, and economical gasoline and diesel engines.
This disconnect from reality perfectly encapsulates Mr. Biden’s energy policy. Its Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed regulations so strict for cars and trucks that they effectively mean 54% of new vehicles sold in the country must be electric vehicles by 2030.
Even if Mr. Biden were to achieve a 500% increase in electric vehicle sales by the end of the decade, he would still be a long way from his goal. The only conceivable way to achieve half of new vehicle sales by 2030 would be if Americans were so poor that they could afford very few new cars, and thus the small number of EVs still could amount to half of all new vehicles. This comes out of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
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From a commodity perspective alone, Mr. Biden’s EV target is fictitious. We simply cannot get the necessary materials in sufficient volume in time. In addition, this administration’s schizophrenic energy policy increases demand for these commodities while limiting supply. Mr. Biden continues to block the mining of lithium, graphite, nickel and rare earth metals.
This is inexplicable, since Mr. Biden’s green energy transition would increase demand for these materials by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900%, and 700%, respectively, in less than 20 years.
But when you consider that “it has taken, on average, more than 16 years for mining projects to move from discovery to first production,” then Biden’s proposals aren’t out of line: they’re laughable.
And where does Mr. Biden think the electricity will come from to power these electric vehicles? The strained power grid already has blackouts and blackouts in parts of the country and could not handle millions more electric vehicles, especially when Mr. Biden is also blocking mining for copper, the main ingredient in power cables.
The transmission capacity of the network should grow by 60% in less than seven years and by 200% in less than 30 years. And that’s just the network infrastructure, not what it would take to power it.
The Biden administration repeatedly refers to electric vehicles as zero-emission vehicles, as if the electricity that powers them has no emissions. Electric vehicles run primarily on fossil fuels, not only because fossil fuels generate so much of our electricity, but because they are dispatchable, meaning their electrical output can be ramped up and down in response to demand.
By contrast, wind and solar generate electricity only when conditions are right, regardless of demand, and nuclear power must be kept at a very constant output to be efficient. This leaves coal and natural gas (and oil on rare occasions) as the real workhorses of electricity generation. When everyone needs to cool their homes and offices at the same time, or charge their electric vehicles, coal and natural gas accelerate.
Mr. Biden’s plan only shifts emissions from one location to another. Instead of the carbon dioxide leaving a tailpipe, it will leave a chimney. Either climate change is not a global problem, or the president is taking the saying “out of sight, out of mind” too literally.
Worse, the United States depends on countries like China for electric vehicles, and those countries will receive a windfall under Mr. Biden’s centrally planned industrial policy.
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China will soon control about a third of the world’s supply of lithium, a critical component for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, these essential resources, when extracted abroad, regularly do so with slave and child labor, and the International Energy Agency has admitted that the environmental damage of mining abroad could offset the reduction of emissions from electric vehicles operating at national level.
Even more ironically, Mr. Biden re-cast electric vehicles as “affordable” and renewed his commitment to provide electric vehicle charging stations in low-income communities. The average electric vehicle costs $61,000, which is 24% more than the average, nearly “affordable” conventional internal combustion engine vehicle.
Charging stations are useless to Americans who cannot afford electric vehicles. It’s like giving batteries to a child who has no toys to use. The average American family has effectively lost $7,100 in purchasing power under Mr. Biden; people don’t have to pay more for a vehicle they can’t drive as far.
The incoherence of Mr. Biden’s energy policy knows no bounds. Hopefully, these policies will come to a swift end just like their equally fantastic predecessor, Don Quixote, did.
