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Elon Musk’s cars are woke now?
If you ever get the sudden, inexplicable urge to give yourself a headache, try searching for “woke electric cars” or “woke electric vehicles.” Whether your preferred flavor of headache involves articles, YouTube videos, or just memes, you’re in for an endless sea of anti-EV screeds — often fueled by misinformation or outright disinformation — on social media or on right-leaning news outlets.
Their arguments usually go something like this: EVs are “a tool of tyranny” being “forced” on us as the government takes away our precious gas cars; they run out of power too easily and will leave you stranded at the first sign of bad weather; they’ll leave the U.S. in permanent thrall to China, or kill our auto industry outright; and they’re worse for the environment than internal combustion engines, and thus aren’t going to fix climate change — which isn’t real anyway. (I think that about sums it up.)
I never see this sort of “content” coming from people with a deep understanding of the evolution of automotive technology, or batteries, or anything else that might qualify them to weigh in here. Usually, they’re from your garden-variety opinion-section cranks, or cynical grifters who make a living off their viral hits, or 40-year veterans of oil industry comms. You know the type. But they’re all very vocal in saying that electric cars, essentially, are woke. And while none of them can define what that means, it is clearly very bad.
The sentiment is spreading into our wider consciousness now, and that goes for the whole world, as The Guardian pointed out recently. Here in America, look no further than our presidential race to find examples. Former President Donald Trump — despite having once touted an electric-car startup as a savior of jobs in the Midwest — has railed against EVs as something that will “decimate” auto manufacturing states like Michigan. And amid the rallies he holds in between his various court dates, he’s taken to delivering rants like this one, about a “friend” who needed “two hours” to charge an electric car on a road trip.
Trump’s knowledge of the workings of the auto industry is suspect on a good day. But as goes Trump, so goes the rest of the field. Republican candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley have lashed out against EVs in similar ways. This summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a Republican-sponsored bill back home designed to save the state $277 million by adding EVs to government fleets. DeSantis went this route, as many critics pointed out, really only after Trump stepped up his anti-EV rhetoric; last year the governor was happy to award nearly $70 million to secure fleets of electric transit buses in his state.
DeSantis must have seen the way the wind is blowing on the right, and it’s toward making sure EVs are portrayed as rolling symbols of a failing Biden administration. That’s part of it, for at least some conservatives; but another part is a general disdain of anything seen as “green,” or the continued perception that EVs are just golf cars, unlike manly, macho, V8-powered cars. (That argument also doesn’t hold up when an electric Kia can hang with a Lamborghini in a drag race.) Either way, cars that run on electrons have become embroiled in our never-ending culture wars, and that will only get worse as this election cycle continues.
But there are countless reasons that framing the auto industry’s gradual move to EVs as a cultural issue simply doesn’t hold up:
EVs are just technology, nothing more. An evolution in how cars work, in line with the same trajectory gasoline cars took for decades: more powerful, more efficient, more high-tech. And yes, those moves often followed stricter fuel economy and emissions regulations here and abroad. But most car companies now are global entities; to compete, they have to offer the newest and best or they’ll be left behind. You might even call it the free market at work and right now, the market is speaking: Though many buyers are currently deterred by the high price of this new technology, this year is still on track to be a record one for EV sales as more and more car companies offer new options.
If EVs are woke, then so is electronic fuel injection, forced induction, airbags, power steering … how back in time do we need to go until the cars aren’t woke? Hand-crank starters? The Model T?
America has always subsidized or protected its car industry. Many Republican politicians are angry about the EV tax credit scheme. But while EV tax credits on the consumer side feel relatively new, that’s not the case with the industry writ large. Think about federal and state tax incentives to build car factories. Or how uniquely protectionist tax rules allowed huge (and profitable) American trucks to dominate the market. Or subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Or even Reagan-era limits on exports from Japan, which just led them to build cars here. Or the bailouts amid the Great Recession.
I could go on and on, but generally speaking, a competitive auto industry is so essential to a country’s economy that its government will go to great lengths to see it succeed. America’s no different, and neither are tax incentives that get people to buy EVs.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. The goal of many investments from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is to build an electric car and battery manufacturing infrastructure here in America, so we’re not wholly dependent on China for it. And guess what? Nearly all of the battery plants being built to support this effort are in Southern red states. Georgia, Kentucky, South, and North Carolina and Tennessee are just some of the states that stand to gain tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. They’re going there for proximity reasons, to support their nearby automakers like Toyota, BMW, Volvo, Nissan and more, but also because those aren’t exactly union-friendly places — an issue the United Auto Workers is not happy about. Seems like all of this would benefit a conservative politician from any of those places, no?
People are not being “forced” into anything. As I’ve written before, the move to a more battery-driven auto industry seems very likely, but it will not be as up-and-to-the-right as many predicted a year ago. It’ll be a rocky, messy, uneven shift that occurs in some countries and even U.S. states ahead of others; that may not be the best thing for our climate but it is reality. In the meantime, no one is being “forced” into this. California and other states may ban the sale of gas cars by the middle of the next decade, but a lot can happen between now and then and all signs point to the market shifting electric by then anyway. Nor have I seen any legislation that would force people to give up their existing cars, which likely would be impossible.
I’m from Texas. You go down there and try telling those people they have to “give up” their F-150s and Silverados. You’d have better luck telling them you’re there to take their guns away; at least they’re used to hearing that. But more and more, as charging grows and U.S.-built batteries drive costs down, hopefully, people will see the benefits of going electric all on their own.
Elon Musk. And here’s probably the ultimate counter-argument to the idea that EVs will wreck your life as much as drag bingo, DEI training at the office, and the other things the TV told you to be very mad about. The modern EV market was catapulted to success by a Texas-based billionaire entrepreneur — the richest man on Earth— who has declared war on the Woke Mind Virus. Say what you want about Musk, and you could say a lot, but Tesla is a genuine American success story. It’s grown from a startup to a global juggernaut with a market cap exceeding that of every other carmaker, all without selling a single gasoline car.
And remember, DeSantis can denounce EVs all he wants, but he still needed Musk and Twitter to announce his candidacy. That’s a pretty inconvenient fact for the anti-EV culture warriors out there.
The truth is, there are valid concerns to be discussed as the auto industry moves away from gasoline; many of them policy-related. Things like the environmental impact of mining, or the labor battle involving EVs that’s playing out in Detroit right now. But that’s not what we’re getting here, with the screeds over electric wokeness — and they just don’t hold up to even a moment of critical thinking.
Naturally, I don’t think the right-wing war on electric cars is going anywhere anytime soon. But ultimately, it may just not matter. The industry’s going to go where it’s going to go in order to compete globally, and all the memes in the world won’t be able to stand in the way of that.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.