Doug Sheridan Cogitates About EVs
“Today’s understanding of climate science and climate policy is so catastrophically poor, so addicted to virtue signaling, that it’s less than worthless to the public.”
Doug Sheridan Cogitates About EVs
Holman Jenkins writes in the WSJ, Joe Biden showed up on a Detroit picket line to support a strike by local auto workers. Nevermind that if the UAW succeeds in its aims, it will gobble up funds needed to sustain Biden's gov't-mandated transition to EVs. The pose must go on.
The union likes to point to the recent anomalous profits at Ford Motor Company and GM, but it really has its eye on the excess margins the companies have enjoy on their domestically built pickup trucks and large SUVS thanks to a 25% import tariff in place since 1964.
A second stream of easy profits has appeared in the form of direct federal handouts to builders and buyers of EVs. UAW chief Shawn Fain makes no bones about wanting to get his hands on these profits, saying, “If the government is going to funnel billions in taxpayer money to these companies, the workers must be compensated with top wages and benefits."
The union is engaged in a financial negotiation, however filled with talk of workers vs. the capitalist class. Fain also has a strategic motive—if battery production for EVs is allowed to take root in nonunion plants, it will accelerate the doom of the gov't-sanctioned UAW labor monopoly over the Big Three.
US auto manufacturing increasingly takes place in foreign-owned factories not subject to union control. But now the UAW faces a new risk from normally friendly territory. Its working-class membership stands in the way of the EV transition that has become a major progressive fetish.
The EV transition is a climate fraud for many reasons. As understood even by top Biden officials, though don’t expect them to say so, subsidizing “green” energy doesn’t actually cause other forms of energy to remain unconsumed—and therefore has little or no effect on emissions.
Biden was never a politician from whom you expected a deep understanding of gov't policy and its effects. Even less today is he thinking about the long-term sustainability of anything. He's thinking about Michigan's 15 electoral votes.
The strike can only have one ending, requiring even more interventions to keep the UAW-staffed companies afloat. It's already happening. Biden’s “EV transition” itself is a Potemkin arrangement of gov't words to conceal billions in taxpayer aid to the UAW-controlled companies.
Biden's limited personal stake in the future makes him unlikely to admit or care about the expensive phoniness of America’s climate and auto-regulation policies. The country needs a non-senile president, one who genuinely cares about America’s condition 30 or 40 years in the future.
It also needs a non-senile news media, devoted to penetrating reality and accurately reflecting it. Today’s understanding of climate science and climate policy is so catastrophically poor, so addicted to virtue signaling, that it’s less than worthless to the public. Change this and politicians might rediscover an incentive to be more truthful and rational in the things they promise.