EVs Are Not the Answer to Oil Shocks

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

 

Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at the think tank Defense Priorities, argues that the Trump administration is repeating the errors of the Carter administration vis-à-vis Iran and the oil market, writing in the New York Times:

 

China [...] recognized its strategic vulnerability to oil shocks years ago and has been methodically decreasing it—not with warships but with electric vehicles and high-speed electric rail. … Over the long run, the United States needs to do what China is already doing: invest in E.V.s.

 

That is not exactly right, beginning with the fact that Chinese oil consumption is rising rather than declining. The Chinese economy is in fact much more energy-intensive than the U.S. economy; it is less oil-intensive not because of the relatively quick and broad deployment of EVs but because the United States has a relatively large transportation sector and China has a relatively large manufacturing sector—which is supported mainly by coal, the fuel for the majority of Chinese electricity production. There’s some irony in that: Environmentalists who admire Chinese EVs ought to appreciate that these are manufactured in factories supported by one of the dirtiest coal-fired electricity sectors on God’s green Earth.

 

In spite of the relative prominence of EVs, Chinese oil consumption is increasing rather than decreasing, and is expected to continue increasing for the immediate future. That is because there are many things you can do with oil other than refine it into gasoline and diesel. Chinese oil consumption is growing in no small part because China’s petrochemical industry is growing; one way to think of EVs is as a way to free up personal transportation’s demand pressure for oil stocks to support the relatively high-value petrochemical sector. EV subsidies may be advertised as climate policy, but effectively they also are petrochemical subsidies.

 

The surging Chinese petrochemical industry is, in fact, a main source of current growth in global oil demand. At nearly $1.8 trillion in annual revenue, China’s chemical industry is something like three times the size of its U.S. counterpart, which is second place worldwide but with output a lot closer to third-place Germany than to China. Chinese oil consumption is growing, oil supports critical Chinese industries, and China is an oil importer. That does not seem to me the profile of a country that is obviously better positioned than the United States to absorb oil shocks.

 

There are some advocates who are, for whatever reason, fixated on EVs and EV subsidies.

 

In the U.S. transportation sector there are, of course, much bigger factors at play than EV subsidies—for example, patterns of urban/suburban/exurban settlement. I would very much prefer to have access to something like the rail systems enjoyed by travelers and commuters (and shippers) in Switzerland or Germany or elsewhere in Europe and parts of Asia, but it is not economically feasible to build an extensive network of such systems in a country where most of the people live in places that look more like Houston or Los Angeles than Geneva or Hong Kong. I do not love the fact that postwar American cities were built for Buicks rather than for people, but that is the fact, and there is no unbuilding them.

 

For this reason and others, EV subsidies in the United States would likely have the most effect among urban-suburban commuters with relatively short daily drives. That probably would not have the effect of lowering U.S. oil consumption—it more likely simply would make gasoline cheaper (cheaper than it would otherwise be) for exurban SUV and pickup drivers and probably have a knock-on effect lowering diesel prices, which would entrench (to the extent that further entrenchment even is possible) that fuel in the long-haul trucking industry, the electrification of which would be a much more complex challenge than using generous tax incentives to get rich people to drive Teslas to Whole Foods.

 

There are excellent economic and environmental reasons to welcome the development and deployment of EVs, just as there would be many desirable outcomes associated with a cleaner and more usable mass-transit (which is not necessarily the same thing as public transit) system in the United States.

 

But in terms of geopolitical hedges, I’ll take the U.S. oil and gas industry over the Chinese EV industry 10 times out of 10.