On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on CBS’s “Face The Nation” to promote the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandates and defend the tariffs the administration is imposing on Chinese-made EVs. During the interview, he said, “The most important thing is that the EV revolution will happen with or without us. And we've got to make sure that it's American-lead.” Buttigieg went on to make some claims that are — I have to use the right words here — complete and utter bullshit.
According to a transcript published by CBS, Buttigieg said:
That's what the president is focused on. We don't want China — look under the Trump administration, they allowed China to build an advantage in the EV industry. But, under President Biden's leadership, we're making sure that the EV revolution will be a made-in-America EV revolution, that is critically important.
Those claims bring to mind President John Adams’ famous line: “Facts are stubborn things.” And the facts are clear: Over the past three decades, China has built such a dominant role in the production of EVs — and the supply chains needed to manufacture them — that the U.S. cannot, will not, be able to catch up, not for decades to come. Indeed, China has Shanghaied the supply chains for everything from EVs and batteries to wind turbines and solar panels.
That’s not an opinion. It’s a stubborn fact. On May 17, just 10 days before Buttigieg appeared on Face the Nation, the International Energy Agency published a report called “Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2024,” which shows that China has a near-monopoly on the metals, minerals, and magnets needed for the over-hyped “energy transition.”
The IEA’s 282-page report details China’s dominance of markets for nickel, graphite, copper, lithium, polysilicon, and neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets. In a remarkable bit of timing, the report came out almost exactly one month after Biden’s EPA published a new mandate in the Federal Register called the “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.” The mandate, published on April 18, is facing numerous legal challenges. If enacted, it will wreck the U.S. auto sector.
Read the rest of this piece at Robert Bryce Substack.
Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, film producer, and podcaster. His articles have appeared in a myriad of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, Time, Austin Chronicle, and Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: The U.S. Secretary of Transportation on Face The Nation, May 26, 2024. Photo: CBS newsclip on YouTube.
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