By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, January 27, 2025
The most irritating thing about former president Joe
Biden’s now-deceased electric vehicle mandate was that it sought to set into
motion a series of industrial changes that, once brought to fruition, would
have led to the abolition of gasoline cars. The second most irritating thing
about former president Joe Biden’s now-deceased electric vehicle mandate was
that its advocates pretended so indignantly that it did no such thing. Perhaps
aware that, as with incandescent lightbulbs and gas stoves and well-pressurized
showerheads and the like, the American public remains unenthusiastic
about the standing offer to make their lives materially worse, advocates of
Biden’s EV order ended up sounding highly schizophrenic. Simultaneously,
Biden’s move was cast as a prerequisite to the long-term survival of the planet
and as a piddling trifle that had been miscast and demagogued by the
political Right. Rarely in the history of social engineering has a ploy led
such a stark double life.
This tendency has carried over to the order’s reversal.
Negatively reviewing President Trump’s decision to nix Biden’s efforts, the New
York Times’ Jack Ewing played a now familiar game. Echoing an oft-repeated line,
Ewing characterized Biden’s edict as having been merely “aspirational” in
nature, before admitting immediately that it was no such thing:
Ultimately, individuals and
families will decide what cars they buy. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids
are gaining market share not only because of subsidies, but also because they
offer rapid acceleration and lower fuel costs. Cars that run on fossil fuels
have been losing share, though that could change if financial incentives are
removed from battery-powered cars and trucks.
As ever, this is sophistry — and confused sophistry at
that. If, per Ewing, it is the case that, “ultimately, individuals and families
will decide what they buy” — and, indeed, that “electric vehicles and plug-in
hybrids are gaining market share” on their own merits — then there was no need
for federal involvement in the first place. By contrast, if the increasing
“market share” enjoyed by electric vehicles is not the product of unmolested
consumer choice, but of “subsidies” and “financial incentives” that, if
removed, will diminish the public’s enthusiasm for those products, then, by
definition, the order had teeth. By trying to have it both ways, Ewing ends up
back in Wonderland — arguing on the one hand that Joe Biden issued a
proclamation that had no material effect on the car industry and, on the other,
that, by replacing it, Donald Trump has caused that industry to change for the
worse.
Like those who came before him, Ewing is desperate to
avoid the term “mandate.” But now, as then, this is a fool’s errand. The
purpose of Biden’s order was to cajole and bribe Americans into buying so many
electric cars that, within a few years, automobile manufacturers would have
been operating in an environment that made the mass production of
gasoline-powered models less feasible. Or, to put it another way: The purpose
of the EV order was to use federal law and treasure to power an industry that would not have taken off otherwise. By explicit design,
Trump’s rescission of that order aims to reverse that bid. There is a reason
that many of the figures quoted in Ewing’s story are so upset about this
development, and it is not because they considered the injunction in question
to be toothless or abstract, but because they correctly understood it to be the
best — and perhaps only — way of
forcing electric vehicles on a country that doesn’t want them. It is no doubt
inconvenient for the Democrats that the American public has proven so
indifferent toward their goals, but that does not obviate their intent. The EV
order mattered when it was signed, and its reversal matters, too.
Advocates of “green” programs such as the cynically
misnamed Inflation Reduction Act often rest their insistence that they are not
“forcing” or “mandating” behavior on the claim that if one is still free to buy
the products that they disdain then one’s choices have not in any meaningful
way been restricted. But this is untrue — both generally and specifically. As a
general matter, it is entirely reasonable for those who wish to keep a consumer
item easily available to oppose long-term efforts to undermine it — even if, at
this particular moment, those efforts have not yet been successful. More
specifically, it is simply not reasonable to appeal to consumer choice when
that choice is being forcibly paid for by others. It is true in a purely
literal sense that, under Joe Biden’s order, a given American was not obliged
to buy an electric car for himself. But, via subsidies that were designed to
make them more attractive than they would otherwise have been, he was certainly
forced to help others buy them and, in the process, make the cars that he
prefers less viable to produce. To their credit, Americans seemed to sense this, which is why the initiative was never
popular, why it became a political liability, and why, just hours into his second
presidency, Donald Trump ceremoniously discarded the project. Technology being
what it is, it is possible that the superiority of electric cars will
eventually be so incontestably clear that they will sweep all before them and
remake the status quo, but, if that does happen, it will not require the help
of the federal Leviathan, and, better still, it will not require a bodyguard of
cynical lies to attend each stage of the plan.
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