LARRY KUDLOW: President Biden is trying to kill gasoline-powered cars
Once again, President Joe Biden is trying to kill gasoline-powered cars. You'd think he'd learn by now how unpopular this is, but he hasn't learned and he's sending his EPA back into action with new tailpipe emissions rules that would basically knock out combustion engines by 2032, which is roughly eight years from now, maybe less.
So, let me get this right. In eight years, Joe Biden wants to knock out an industry that for about 125 years has been one of the backbones of the entire American economy. How arrogant can you get? I'll call it chutzpah. Last year, electric vehicles, or EVs, made up less than 8% of new car sales.
Ford took a $4.7 billion operating loss on its EV business. EVs are significantly more expensive than gas-powered cars. The shift to EVs is inherently inflationary – and is also a key reason car insurance rates are rising so fast. There aren't remotely enough electric battery chargers available. Something like 172,000 were installed last year, while estimates suggest 2 million new chargers are actually needed by 2030.
Most of all, Americans don't want EVs. They don't want to hang out for hours to fill up their battery, when they can fill up their gas tank in under three minutes. They don't want to pay more and they don't like all these over-educated, left-wing, Green New Deal Biden bureaucrats telling them what to do, what to buy, how to breathe or anything else.
It's the same story with these climate extremists taking away gas stoves, hot water heaters, pizza ovens, shower heads, dishwashers, microwaves, air conditioners, ceiling fans and so on and so forth.
You can almost hear people screaming, "Stop telling me how to live and what to buy." Of course, the assault on gasoline cars removes consumer choice. This is supposed to be a free country, but the Green New Deal-crats don't think we should have a free country with real consumer choice.
Meanwhile, Detroit and the existing American car industry will be destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Wages will go down and, by the way, will there be less carbon emissions on balance? I don't think so. The commodities necessary to make the batteries and the batteries themselves will release massive amounts of carbon and then, of course, when you plug in the batteries, you need electricity, and it is not going to all be solar or wind.
Meanwhile, the EVs are heavier. They damage tires and roads, which requires more tires and roads, therefore emitting more carbon and then there's the Chinese story that the Bidens remain in complete denial about.
China has the battery commodities. China has massive subsidies to supply batteries and build EVs. China is already flooding the world market with cheap cars, mostly EVs and now, they want to route their cheap EVs through Mexico in order to avoid tariffs when they’re sold in the U.S.
Can the Bidens really believe that average Americans don't understand all this? That we're being taken to the cleaners by China? That American jobs won't be lost, towns damaged, communities hurt? All because of something called "climate science" that itself makes no sense at all. Donald Trump was right when he recently pointed out that President Biden's EV mandate will do great harm to the U.S. auto industry. You might say it will cause… a bloodbath.
This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the March 21, 2024, edition of "Kudlow."