On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on CBS’s “Face The Nation” to promote the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandates and defend the tariffs the administration is imposing on Chinese-made EVs. [emphasis, links added]
During the interview, he said, “The most important thing is that the EV revolution will happen with or without us. And we’ve got to make sure that it’s American-led.”
Buttigieg went on to make some claims that are — I have to use the right words here — complete and utter bullshit.
According to a transcript published by CBS, Buttigieg said:
That’s what the president is focused on. We don’t want China — look under the Trump administration, they allowed China to build an advantage in the EV industry. But, under President Biden’s leadership, we’re making sure that the EV revolution will be a made-in-America EV revolution; that is critically important.
Those claims bring to mind President John Adams’ famous line: “Facts are stubborn things.” And the facts are clear: Over the past three decades, China has built such a dominant role in the production of EVs — and the supply chains needed to manufacture them — that the U.S. cannot, will not, be able to catch up, not for decades to come.
Indeed, China has shanghaied the supply chains for everything from EVs and batteries to wind turbines and solar panels.
That’s not an opinion. It’s a stubborn fact.
On May 17, just 10 days before Buttigieg appeared on Face the Nation, the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report called “Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2024,” which shows that China has a near-monopoly on the metals, minerals, and magnets needed for the over-hyped “energy transition.”
The IEA’s 282-page report details China’s dominance of markets for nickel, graphite, copper, lithium, polysilicon, and neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets.
In a remarkable bit of timing, the report came out almost exactly one month after Biden’s EPA published a new mandate in the Federal Register called the “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.”
The mandate, published on April 18, is facing numerous legal challenges. If enacted, it will wreck the U.S. auto sector. As the Wall Street Journal explained last week, the EPA rule will:
Effectively require that EVs and plug-in hybrids make up roughly 70% of auto-maker sales by 2032, up from about 9% last year. Companies will have to produce one to two electric trucks for every gas-powered one in 2027, and closer to four to one by 2032…The EPA’s quotas will also result in higher prices for gas-powered cars, as automakers seek to offset EV losses.
Those losses are already gobsmacking.
As I reported here a few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. lost over $65,000 for every EV it sold during the first quarter. In 2023, Ford lost more money on EVs than it made in net profit. In addition, there’s clear evidence that the market for EVs is small.
As I explained last October, “EVs have long been a niche-market product, not a mass-market one. Further, that niche market is primarily defined by class and ideology.”
I pointed to a study published last fall by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, which concluded that “about half of all EVs went to the 10% most Democratic counties, and about one-third went to the top 5%.”
Buttigieg can hype EVs all he likes, but sales are declining. Last month, Volkswagen reported that its EV sales in Europe fell by 24% during the first quarter, and Mercedes-Benz reported an 8% drop in EV sales.
Last week, Ford told its dealers to halt EV-related investments until after the company completes a “review” sometime next month.
The new IEA report shows that U.S. automakers cannot build EVs without depending, wholly or in large part, on Chinese suppliers.
The report says demand for “energy transition minerals is set to expand significantly across all scenarios,” over the next few years, with demand for commodities like nickel, cobalt, and rare earth minerals showing “robust growth, increasing by 65 to 80% by 2040.”
It continues, noting the market for transition minerals is:
Concentrated, with China claiming nearly 50% of the market value in 2030. China also sees a rise in market value for mined materials as the country’s production of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements undergoes rapid expansion…Global mineral supply chains are not well diversified, and recent progress on diversifying supply sources has been limited…These high levels of supply concentration raise risks of potential supply disruptions due to physical accidents, geopolitical events or other developments in a key producing country, with major potential implications for the speed of energy transitions.”
The report underscores China’s dominance in EVs, which require six times more metals and minerals than internal combustion vehicles.
Read rest at Substack
And thats why Biden wants to force us all into EV’s for his Partner in Crime. China
Really, the answer to this is to stop buying crap from China. I have.