It’s an election year, and that mean President Joe Biden will be breaking promises he made to people who will vote for him no matter what he does in hopes of winning the votes of others who might actually retain enough critical thinking ability to look elsewhere for leadership.
This time around, it’s American car manufacturers and the unions that represent their workers — and represent sizable annual donations to Democratic coffers as well, of course.
The Biden administration is reportedly looking to scale back its requirements that 60 percent of all new car production in the U.S. consist of electric vehicles by 2030 in an effort to cut back vehicle emissions, Reuters explained. The current rule also requires that number to increase to 67 percent by 2032.
The only problem with those requirements is, well, pretty much everything, according to trade groups and labor union representatives.
Supply chains and production facilities cannot adjust that quickly to such a massive change. Nowhere near enough public charging facilities exist to support that many electric vehicles. Perhaps most importantly, consumers just don’t want electric vehicles the way Biden officials wish they would.
The U.S. was founded on free market principles, not a centrally planned economy, which is the dream of leftists — like President Joe Biden and most of his administration.
But, like I said, it’s an election year, which means that even idealogues like Biden have to submit their pipe dreams to the reality of the free market. Through Nov. 5, at least.
According to Reuters, the result of that submission for now is that the Biden administration is planning to slow down its lofty goals for America’s transition to electric vehicles to something more in line with what the United Auto Workers have suggested all along.
The union has said that the Environmental Protection Agency regulations should allow for the stricter emissions limits to come into play “more gradually,” according to Reuters, and over a “greater period of time” — which seems to me to be two ways of saying the same thing, but, hey, whatever it takes to get through the indoctrinated skulls of Team Biden.
Will you ever purchase an electric vehicle?
John Bozzella, CEO of an automaker trade group called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, apparently agrees.
“Give the market and supply chains a chance to catch up, maintain a customer’s ability to choose, let more public charging come online, let the industrial credits and Inflation Reduction Act do their thing and impact the industrial shift,” Bozzella told the outlet.
An EPA spokesperson told Reuters that its proposed adjustment is “under interagency review” and that whatever it finally lands on will be designed to be “readily achievable, secures reductions in dangerous air and climate pollution and ensures economic benefits.”
Gee, I kind of figured they would have been aiming at those targets with the first rule. Go figure.
Even the leftists at The New York Times noted cynically that the shift is coming during an election year in which Biden “faces intense crosswinds” as he pushes anti-climate-change proposals while continuing to need the support of unions whose workers are likely to be hurt by some of those proposals.
Biden won Michigan in 2020 over former President Donald Trump by only 1.78 percent; it wouldn’t take much of a shift in union voting to change those results in 2024.
Moreover, current polling shows Trump over Biden in the battleground state by an average of 4.8 percent, according to RealClearPolitics. It’s awfully early in the contest for those numbers to mean much, of course. But it’s not too early for the Biden campaign to take notice of and try to address them.
Whether this shift by the EPA will help at all remains anyone’s guess. It may be considered too little, too late by many Michigan autoworkers and their families.
And after all, the initial proposal — issued in 2023 before anyone was paying much attention to poll numbers — is certainly a better indication of Biden’s long-term goals, and Michiganders are smart enough to realize that.
