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Sparks

Trump Trashed Electric Cars Instead of Going to the GOP Debate

The former president zeroes in on range anxiety.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump spent much of his not-a-debate-for-me speech at a non-union Michigan auto parts company trashing the Biden administration’s economic and climate policy, specifically its support for electric vehicles.

The United Autoworkers strike against the “Big Three” American automakers has split Republicans while Democrats, including President Biden, have largely supported the striking workers. Some Republicans, like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, have voiced support for the workers’ demands for higher pay, while others, like Nikki Halley and Tim Scott, both of whom are on stage tonight in California, have criticized the union.

Trump, meanwhile, has consistently used the strike to attack Biden’s climate policy and tonight was no different.

“Biden’s cruel and ridiculous” mandates for electric vehicles, Trump said, “will spell the death of the U.S. auto industry.”

Addressing striking autoworkers directly, Trump said “you’re all on picket lines … it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what you get, because in two years you’ll all be out of business, you’re not getting anything, what they’re doing to the auto industry in Michigan and throughout the country is absolutely horrible and ridiculous.”

Trump brought this rambling critique around to a point of view that might be shared by more rhetorically constrained conservatives like Hawley and Vance, namely that electrifying the United States automobile fleet will largely benefit China.

“A vote for crooked Joe means the future of the auto industry will be made in China,” he said later in the speech. Biden’s signature piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, actually offers incentives for domestic manufacturing.

Trump also attacked electric cars specifically, echoing common complaints about a lack of range and the environmental effects of mining for the minerals used to make batteries.

“Those batteries, when they get rid of them, lots of bad things happen. When they’re digging it out of the ground to make those batteries, it’s going to be bad for the environment,” he said.

Trump often mixes support for American fossil fuel extraction with environmental-coded attacks on green energy. Frequent objects of his ire are wind turbines (he loves talking about how they kill birds) and, recently, he has started talking about how offshore wind turbines kill whales.

“Crooked Joe Biden is siding with the left wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself,” he said.

He also repeatedly mentioned electric vehicle range. “[Electric cars] are built specifically for people who want to take very short trips. ‘Darling, let’s drive down to the store and let’s drive back!’ Oh, it’s crazy,” Trump said. He also accused the Biden administration of purposefully raising gas prices to force people into buying electrical vehicles.

While American auto companies hardly see eye-to-eye with the Biden administration on everything, they have dived into electrification, suggesting that Trump’s claims that the American auto industry will die thanks to environmental policy are at least not shared by the industry itself.

So Trump attacked the car industry, saying “I don’t get one thing, I don’t get why … these carmakers are fighting to make cars that are going to sell, cars that are going to long distances.” He said that these carmakers, as well as oil companies that invest in wind energy, are “going against their industry” and are “either stupid or gutless.”

“Why is it that these big powerful car companies with guys making $35 million a year” are making electric vehicles, “when the damn things don’t go far enough and they’re too expensive,” Trump said.

“Why are they all agreeing to this?” Trump said, “why are they not fighting, saying, ‘it doesn’t work.’”

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Sparks

After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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Blue
Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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Green