The global EV calamity

The article critiques shifting narratives around climate data and EV policies, highlighting media complicity and governmental inconsistencies.
The article critiques shifting narratives around climate data and EV policies, highlighting media complicity and governmental inconsistencies.

Summary

Blame the Obama era’s ‘permission structures’ behind a phony climate fix.

The years just keep getting warmer. I mean this facetiously. At first, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told us 2016 was 0.94 degree warmer than the 20th-century average. Then the agency raised its estimate by several steps to 1 degree in 2020 before dropping it back to 0.99 perhaps under Trump influence. With Democrats back in charge under President Biden, 2016 started getting warmer again, reaching 1.03 degrees in 2023. The latest NOAA chart shows it 1.04 degrees warmer than the baseline.

Consider it a small evidence of what David Samuels, in a widely noted article, calls the legacy of Obama-era “permission structures." By permission structures, he means a “whole of society" strategy of pressure and subtle bullying to force buy-in of Obama goals. I hit on a similar formula in 2012 when I explained how Mr. Obama imposed his will by giving voters “permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him."

One residue, which NOAA obviously participated in, was the permission structure behind today’s gathering boondoggle created by Obama-era mandated investment in electric vehicles.

A feature Mr. Samuels stresses is an Obamaesque ability to substitute new, instantly embraced ideas for old, instantly embraced ideas. In his first two years, Joe Biden justified his giant increase in EV subsidies and mandates by citing the “existential risk" of global climate change. Then that argument was junked overnight. EVs became a “strategic" technology that must be protected from Chinese competition.

Both arguments were nonsense, as I belabored here, yet were seamlessly echoed in the media in turn. Subsidizing green-energy consumption is simply to subsidize energy consumption, including fossil energy. EVs are “strategic" only for China, to reduce its reliance on imported oil in anticipation of military conflict with the U.S. For the rest of the world, including the U.S., electric cars are a consumer technology, albeit a fast-emerging and promising one. Sensibly, they’re also a technology that should have been left to consumers and carmakers to adapt and develop without distorting handouts and mandates.

The result is finally in view: a colossal self-destruction of the Western auto industry, with Germany’s at the forefront. Volkswagen is in a panic about Chinese competition to the money-losing EVs that Berlin forces the company to sell. Germany’s export-led economy is in free fall. Its bellwether auto giant, VW, is pursuing its first-ever domestic factory closures and layoffs.

Likewise, Ford CEO Jim Farley sees his company’s survival in the U.S. threatened by Chinese EVs given the tens of thousands of dollars Ford already loses on each of its government-mandated electric vehicles. The author of Germany’s auto mess, Angela Merkel, is now reviled as an unprincipled bandwagon grabber. Don’t kid yourself. The same reputational fate is coming for Messrs. Obama and Biden. Mr. Biden’s EV protectionism is America’s admission of defeat. The U.S. went from “Americans must buy EVs to save the planet" to “Americans must be prevented from buying cheap, high-quality Chinese EVs to preserve a government-created domestic boondoggle."

True, a U.S. economy that spent $2 trillion on Afghanistan, then left another $7 billion in military equipment behind, can probably afford the crypto auto bailout that’s coming. It isn’t clear Germany can. Still, this policy catastrophe likely wouldn’t have been possible without the New York Times, even as its influence fades.

In almost every edition its reporters chant that EVs are a climate solution, without ever bothering to understand how they even arrived at this shibboleth. The paper’s editors never stumble across the obvious questions: Then why are global emissions growing faster than ever? When the U.S. spends the equivalent of $20 or even $50 per gallon of gasoline saved to encourage Americans to drive EVs, how is this anything but an exorbitant subsidy to the rest of the world to consume the now-cheaper gasoline in our stead?

OK, I’ve covered this ground many times. In one sense, the problem is self-correcting as traditional media outlets lose credibility and see their audiences dwindle. Yet papers like the Times and a few others are society’s primary maintainers of large reporting staffs. They need to figure out that they aren’t any longer in the news business—news can be had for free anywhere. They aren’t in the tendentious spin business, also freely available anywhere.

They are in the understanding business, for a select audience that values intelligence and is willing to pay for it. Even more so if part of their readership truly cares about climate change. Then the job is holding government policy to a serious standard, rather than slavishly cheerleading for the self-serving partisan hustles of their political favorites.

Example: A serious reporting outfit might launch an inquisition into how and why NOAA goes about constantly tweaking 2016 to make it a warmer and warmer year.

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