The Washington Post was very excited about the Biden administration’s latest effort to reward friends and punish enemies.
The WoePost’s headline read:"Biden to remake U.S. auto industry with toughest emissions limits ever."
The friends being rewarded are the subsidy farmers harvesting tax dollars in exchange for electric vehicles (EVs), "green" energy companies that will presumably be providing the power the short-range, limited capacity, weather dependent and expensive EVs and China that manufactures the batteries and mines other raw materials involved with "green" energy.
The enemies that will be punished are those nasty fossil fuel drillers, refiners, and sellers; manufacturers of gas-powered vehicles, and other knuckle-draggers, who insist on buying gas-powered vehicles.
For instance: You.
What Biden plans to do this time is stand on the shore and order the tide not to rise and wet his feet. Whoops! Wrong autocrat.
No, Biden "announced the strictest restrictions on auto emissions ever, in an ambitious and fraught bid to advance the president’s climate agenda by forcing U.S. car companies to rapidly accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.
"The Environmental Protection Agency proposals — which would dramatically tighten emissions limits on all vehicles from passenger cars to big trucksThe most aggressive of several EPA options could lead to 67 percent of all new passenger car and light-duty truck sales being electric by 2032."
No one, certainly not the leftist stenographer at The Washington Post, bothered to ask just where does Biden get the power to remake the auto industry? Wouldn’t a sweeping change like that require say legislation and congressional approval?
The joke’s on you, that is, all of us — again!
That’s the old pre-COVID-19 U.S.
Now an "emergency" like global warming can’t wait on something as unreliable as democracy or Congress.
We're no longer "The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave."
We're now the "Land of the Mandate and the Home of the Executive Order."
There were dissenting voices.
The Washington Examiner called the edict "Biden’s illegal move to ban vehicle internal combustion engines."
Adding, as we observed, "the Biden Administration proposes to do through the administrative state what cannot be done through Congress. . . . These rules will de facto ban internal combustion engines. Moreover, the regulations would fundamentally alter the industrial base of the United States."
And reality will also get a vote on the policy and it appears to be negative.
Energy expert Alex Epstein posted a long Twitter thread that used facts to point out how reckless and impractical this exercise in punitive politics really is. "If EVs were actually as good as their advocates say, they wouldn't require lavish subsidies — let alone Biden's mandate on top of lavish subsidies."
Electric vehicles are not cost-effective for the majority of the driving public.
You may recall our column on the test of the electric pickup truck.
The competition was between a gas-powered Chevy and an electron-powered Ford, both towing a travel trailer. (You can enjoy that entire column here.)
The result was a drastic lowering of vacation horizons for the battery boosters.
"This means campers considering using an electric vehicle to tow the trailer will have to adjust to playing charger leapfrog every 80 miles or so with at least an hour spent calculating how much carbon you offset at each stop as you wait for the charge to finish."
These miserable results extend across the entire EV buying and owning experience. Epstein again, "Today's EVs, despite promises that they would already surpass gasoline vehicles, are not cost-effective for the vast majority of Americans.
"That's why despite huge government subsidies, only 6% of us buy EVs. Mandating EVs violates our rights and hurts the poor most of all."
And that is if nothing changes. "EVs may become even less cost-effective in the future due to rising electricity prices and growing shortages as reliable power plants are shut down in favor of unreliable solar/wind — and increasing raw material prices (due to artificial, government-created demand for batteries)."
Right now, in California electricity is so expensive it’s cheaper to buy gas than it is to buy electricity and that’s if the electricity is currently on. Last summer the California power czars ordered people to avoid charging their cutting edge EVs because the strain on the power grid was too great.
The lunatic policy of shutting down reliable coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants in exchange for intermittent and unreliable wind and solar power will only make the problem worse in the future.
We agree completely with Epstein’s summary of Biden’s latest insane policy adventure: "The Admin is dictating two deadly policies at the same time:
— Drastically reducing the supply of reliable electricity by shutting down reliable power plants
— Drastically increasing demand for reliable electricity by mandating EVs
This is a recipe for national immobility."
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker's bureau. Read Michael Reagan's Reports — More Here.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher for the League of American Voters, and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!)" Read Michael Shannon's Reports — More Here.