John Garnett Trump Was Right to Kill the EV Mandate Scrapping the EPA’s draconian tailpipe-emissions rule will boost competition, benefit consumers, and strengthen national security.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-epa-electric-vehicle-mandate-tailpipe-emissions-rule
In his March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump celebrated terminating Joe Biden’s “insane electric vehicle mandate.” A year ago, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency had finalized a rule, nominally about tailpipe emissions, that would have required 30 percent to 56 percent of all new light-duty consumer cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles (EVs). Trump announced his intention to undo Biden’s EV overreach in his first week in office, as part of his executive order entitled “Unleashing American Energy.”
Biden’s rule would have brought chaos to the automotive industry, caused significant economic harm to millions of Americans, and put U.S. national security at risk. Repealing it will level the playing field in the EV market in ways that will benefit American consumers. According to Kelley Blue Book, the cheapest gasoline car available in America in 2025, the Nissan Versa, costs $18,300. The cheapest EV, the Nissan Leaf, costs $29,280—a staggering 60 percent more expensive.
The logistics of owning an EV are also complicated and time-consuming. EV chargers need to be installed at homes and apartment complexes, and charging a car can take more than 12 hours, compared with the less than five minutes it takes to fill up a tank of gas. The Leaf EV can travel 149 miles on a full charge; the Versa can go more than 375 miles on a full tank of gas, over 150 percent farther.
Long lines at charging stations, range anxiety, poor performance in adverse climate conditions, and 30 percent higher repair costs with limited garage options are just some of the problems EV owners lament. A McKinsey survey found that a shocking 46 percent of EV owners are likely to switch back to gasoline-powered cars in the future.
Given these drawbacks, EV sales would have stalled absent government intervention. Biden’s EV mandate was thus a bailout for a floundering market, which saw a sales slump in 2023 and 2024. In the lead-up to the new rule, major automakers from Ford to General Motors to Volkswagen had pumped the brakes on EV manufacturing.
Why? Wealthy households initially adopted EVs as high-tech status symbols, but the cars remain cost-prohibitive for most people. While federal subsidies induced artificial demand for EVs, interest waned as consumers learned about the downsides.
Putting all of America’s eggs in the EV basket would also have posed a national security risk. The Congressional Research Service has found that the U.S. is highly reliant on other nations for critical minerals needed for manufacturing EV batteries. America imports 25 percent to 50 percent of its lithium supply, 50 percent of nickel, 75 percent of cobalt, and 100 percent of manganese and graphite.
China is the world’s leading producer of rare earths and graphite, as well as a Top 10 producer of lithium and nickel. While most of the world’s cobalt gets mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (amid human rights violations and deplorable conditions for workers), 75 percent of global cobalt is refined in China—giving Beijing effective control over that mineral, too.
An EV mandate would thus replace the U.S. strategic advantage of plentiful oil reserves with a strategic vulnerability: dependence on critical minerals disproportionately controlled by a foreign adversary. Competition for control of resources needed for green technology has also led to a new “scramble for Africa,” with the great powers vying to stake out claims on the continent. This not only threatens the safety and sovereignty of millions but could also entangle the U.S. in foreign interventions.
Finally, overreliance on EVs would deepen American dependence on an increasingly overtaxed electricity grid. One need only look to the Texas blackouts of 2021 or the 2003 blackout in the Northeast to see the potential impact of grid failures. In that earlier incident, a failure at one power station snowballed into a blackout affecting 50 million people for days. Drinking water stopped flowing, hospitals had to rely on backup generators, and transportation systems failed. The estimated economic losses ran between $4 billion and $10 billion. For years, foreign adversaries have been probing for ways to attack U.S. critical infrastructure, with the fattest target being the electricity grid.
Repealing the Biden EV mandate will put an end to government favoritism, forcing automakers to compete on a level playing field. Consumers will gain from this healthy competition. More importantly, freeing itself from the EV mandate will give the United States time to modernize its grid and reduce its exposure to heightened national security risks.
Comments are closed.
