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The Environmental Protection Agency last week released new emissions standards that would likely require two-thirds of new cars sold in the U.S. to be all-electric by 2032. The ambitious plan is likely to touch off a legal skirmish, but no matter what the courts say, the political battle is already over. The opposition to electric vehicles is old, soft, and in the process of being savvily bought off. Worries about a backlash are wildly overblown.
Not everyone sees it that way. Axios’ Josh Kraushaar encapsulated the conventional wisdom when he wrote that “Spending political capital on a climate change initiative geared largely toward the affluent part of the electorate — not the Americans struggling to pay for a new car — threatens to exacerbate Biden's economic challenges.” For Kraushaar, it is indicative of Democrats being “stuck in a bubble of the progressive base.” He warns that Biden’s climate policies could “be reversed” should he lose office.
But the transition to EVs is happening faster than Kraushaar thinks, and is much less vulnerable to political shifts than it was even two years ago, thanks to investments included in the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as an overall shift in industrial policy meant to cut China out of critical U.S. supply chains. And while automakers might chafe at the timeline, the new regulations will only spur more capital investment and technological innovation.
It’s true that some Fox News pundits and Republican officials have made no secret of their hostility to electric vehicles. State lawmakers in Wyoming, for example, introduced a bill calling for a phase-out of EV sales in the state by 2035. A North Carolina Republican proposed an absurd bill requiring that free diesel and gasoline be offered anywhere there is a free electric charging station. And there’s no question that battles loom over who will profit from car-charging and how we will manage the twilight of the gas-powered engine era.
So far, though, these kinds of bills and initiatives don’t appear to have legs even in red states despite the media attention they invite, in part because automakers are locating many of their battery factories in the heavily GOP Deep South and Sun Belt. Leaders in states like Georgia and North Carolina — critical to Republican national fortunes – have gone out of their way to attract battery manufacturers and aren’t likely to go to war with a major new industry. You can ask Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis how his battle with Disney is going to get a sense of how picking pointless fights with large employers is likely to turn out.
Another sign that the war over EVs will be brief and one-sided is that leading national Republicans, including potential 2024 presidential contenders like DeSantis, as well as other GOP governors, seem to support the EV revolution. That leaves former President Trump and his aging army of MAGA misinformation artists making absurd claims like, “The cars go for like two hours.” That’s the kind of nonsense that might thrill the crowd at a Trump rally but no longer sounds credible to most people.
Now, Trump isn’t the only Republican boomer skeptical of EVs. As with so many public policy issues, there is significant age and partisan polarization around all-electric cars. A recent AP-NORC/EPIC poll found younger respondents and Democrats much more likely to be seriously considering an EV for their next vehicle than elderly and Republican buyers. A quarter of 18-29 year-olds were “extremely or very likely” to choose an EV as their next car purchase, with another 31% saying they are “somewhat likely” to do so. Among Americans 60 and over, 57% say they are “not too likely” or “not at all likely” to buy an EV. 63% of Republicans say they are unlikely to buy an EV, against 31% of Democrats.
Why are older, more conservative Americans wedded to gas-powered cars? Maybe they like the smell of petrol because it reminds them of a time when driving cars with the gas mileage of a main battle tank was uncontroversial. Or maybe they’ll miss the distinctive rumble of an internal combustion engine roaring to life. Or maybe they’re just nervous about trying a new technology and will have to be coaxed into an EV.
Either way, generational churn is a fact of life. And majorities of Millennials and Zoomers support phasing out gas-powered vehicles altogether. By 2032, many of those young people will be approaching middle age, and millions of Boomers will be gone. Fossil fuel dead-enders hoping that the next generation will be more right-leaning than Gen Z should check out this 2022 poll of 13-19 year-olds, which found 84% agreeing with the idea that “if we don't address climate change today, it will be too late for future generations, making some parts of the planet unlivable.”
Perhaps just as importantly, many of the lingering concerns people have about EVs will diminish with rapid advances in technology. Next generation batteries will have longer ranges, fewer bugs, and shorter charging times. Worries that EVs are far more expensive than gas powered cars are quickly becoming obsolete. Chevy now has two EVs that retail for under $30,000, including the well-reviewed SUV version of the Volt. The Bolt EUV starts at just over $27,000 — and it is eligible for $7,500 in tax credits. Good luck finding a gas-powered SUV in that range.
The shift to EV production and supply chains is industry-wide and will be extremely difficult to reverse even if a Republican is elected president in 2024. Large manufacturers like Ford and Honda continue to make enormous global investments in EV production that will continue bringing prices down through competition while boosting driving ranges. As governments in overseas markets implement stricter emissions standards, automakers will have even less incentive to cater to the minority of people in a single, albeit very large, market who remain committed to gas powered cars.
It might be hard to imagine EVs as the vast majority of cars sold in the U.S. by 2032, when they were just 5.7% of all sales last year. But all-electric sales have already tripled since 2019. In a few years, as the expansion of charging stations and domestic battery production propelled by the Inflation Reduction Act makes owning an EV less unusual and more practical even for people outside of cities, all that will be left is the far right’s bizarre culture war fixation on fossil fuels, boosted by social media-fueled disinformation shared by meme and email about how EVs are worse for the environment or less safe to drive.
That’s not to say Republican defenders of the status quo will go down without a fight. And if Trump manages to get elected, he could seriously complicate the picture. But by the time he would take office in 2025, there will be millions more perfectly happy EV owners who won’t take kindly to efforts to turn back the clock.
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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.