Automakers Are Calling Out Biden's EV FantasyDavid Blackmon
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
July 01, 2023 9:12 AM ET
The Biden administration is getting significant pushback from auto industry representatives over its anticipated tightening of EPA rules governing tailpipe emissions. In a draft memo leaked this week, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation (AAI) refers to the proposed standards as being “neither reasonable nor achievable in the timeframe provided.”
Honestly, that describes pretty much the entire energy/environment agenda of this presidency. Specific to this latest EPA crackdown, AAI — which represents most EV makers in the U.S. other than Tesla — notes that the “proposed rules effectively assume that everything ‘will go perfectly’ in the transformation to EVs between now and 2032. The agency unrealistically assumes, for example, an over-abundance of battery critical mineral mines, critical mineral processing capacity and battery component, cell and pack production facilities lead to continued battery price reductions. The recently released Q1 2023 Get Connected EV report shows how China dominates those areas.”
For electric vehicles (EVs), this issue of critical mineral supplies is the key to everything. The main reason why EVs weigh so much more than gas and diesel powered cars is the prodigious amount of critical energy minerals that go into the making of the lithium-ion batteries that power them. The minerals required include lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite, all of which are recovered via hard rock mining operations.
But the U.S. and other countries in North America and Europe made a collective decision to essentially farm out the business of hard rock mining to developing nations and the processing of them to China in the 1980s as part of the environmental priorities of that time. As a result, most supply chains for these and other key energy minerals are under control of the communist Chinese government.
more
https://dailycaller.com/2023/07/01/opinion-automakers-are-calling-out-bidens-ev-fantasy-david-blackmon/