There is a curious cognitive dissonance in how a lot of us think about the last decade’s climate policies and this decade’s economic problems.
During the final years of the 2010s, the Trump administration proudly tore up dozens of policies meant to lower American greenhouse gas emissions and build a competitive domestic clean energy industry. It prioritized oil, coal and natural gas businesses over wind, solar and batteries, and as president, Donald Trump often seemed to revel in picking policies that would increase emissions by design.
These choices came with costs: American automakers failed to make their cars more efficient, and within a few years, they had fallen behind their international competition, especially South Korean and Chinese automakers.
Today, the United States finds itself badly lagging behind China not just in hybrid and electric vehicles but also in many other crucial industries: solar, wind and battery production, as well as the refining of some minerals. China now makes more than half of the world’s electric vehicles, and BYD, the Chinese automaker, is expanding so quickly that it has plans to open factories abroad in Europe, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and South America.
Those were the costs of just one Trump term. If Mr. Trump returns to Washington, he has promised to once again pull us out of the Paris climate agreement, which the United States had rejoined under the Biden administration. He again wants to kill the country’s clean car standards. And he’s threatened to cut off the generous federal subsidies for selling and building electric vehicles in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate policy. Although he’s recently softened some of his hate for electric vehicles — “you know, because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” he said in Georgia last month, referring to Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk — he still believes only a “very small slice” of cars should run on electricity.
Mr. Trump’s policies would devastate America’s growing electric vehicle industry. They would allow China to consolidate its control of the world’s electric vehicle and lithium-ion battery industries, and they would hamstring American — or European or East Asian — companies from developing the necessary expertise to compete with China.
For all of Mr. Trump’s putative concerns about American manufacturing, his obsession with fossil fuels — and the industry’s financial hold on him — has blinded him to what will drive industrial competitiveness in the future. America did not just happen to fall behind China in the years after he killed our climate policies. America has fallen behind China in large part because Mr. Trump killed our climate policies. With him once again in the Oval Office, America would be at risk of falling even further behind.
When Mr. Trump took office in 2017, American carmakers pushed him to roll back the Obama administration’s strict tailpipe pollution rules that financially rewarded automakers that sold plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles.
But Mr. Trump wound up going so far in his rollbacks that some of the automakers blanched, either because the cuts went much further than executives expected or because they realized that the denuded standards would place their companies out of step with the global market. By 2019, a handful of automakers — Ford, Volkswagen, Honda and BMW — struck a deal with California to adopt slightly stricter rules. But other companies, including General Motors, did not reverse course on the rollback until after the 2020 election.
The dangers of this approach for American companies were clear at the time. When Mr. Trump took the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, many observers — myself included — warned that China would seize the opportunity to excel in the industries of the future, especially renewables. That became even more likely when Mr. Trump rolled back the rules on tailpipe emissions.
Mr. Trump’s only answer to this risk was to impose tariffs on some Chinese-made renewables. But he did not provide the kind of robust spending or regulatory certainty that would have allowed American companies to compete with Chinese ones — so China did, in fact, cement a lead in green tech during this period.
Today, China produces more than 80 percent of the world’s solar panels, and it controls about six-tenths of the world’s wind-power manufacturing capacity. Chinese companies make 75 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries. The country also dominates the mining and refining of the minerals that go into renewables, electronics and batteries.
China achieved this commanding position by taking nearly the opposite approach that Mr. Trump did. Through the 2010s, the Chinese government used a combination of enormous subsidies, regulations and bureaucratic nudges to encourage the creation of a thriving electric vehicle industry. Chinese consumers got a rebate when they bought an electric vehicle, hydrogen car or plug-in hybrid. The government made it easier for them to get a license plate for a new-energy vehicle than a gas-burning car.
To be sure, China didn’t foster the E.V. industry solely for environmental reasons. Unlike America, which has abundant oil and natural gas, China is relatively energy poor. Its standing as the world’s largest oil importer is a profound national security problem, and China has sought to improve its position by embracing electric vehicles and fuel-efficient plug-in hybrids as well as building more coal plants, nuclear plants and solar and wind farms.
But the combination of Mr. Trump’s apathy and China’s investment means America is now rushing to catch up to China’s lead in the solar, wind, battery and electric vehicle industries. It is an open question whether it can get there.
The Biden administration has been trying to help America in this race. The Inflation Reduction Act rewards companies that make electric vehicles and batteries, or refine certain critical minerals. The White House is reportedly considering creating a backstop for mineral prices to encourage their mining and refining. (China already employs a similar strategy in many sectors.) A potential Harris administration would most likely continue these initiatives.
But catching up will take time. Ford, despite a promising start, has failed to create an efficient or profitable electric vehicle division and recently delayed the launch of its new electric vehicle platform to 2027. G.M. has also struggled to get its electric vehicle unit off the ground. And the big, bloated cars on America’s roads have created a profound safety crisis — America’s roads are, by one measure, more dangerous than Russia’s in part because of our gargantuan gas-guzzling vehicles.
Can these failures be laid solely at Mr. Trump’s feet? No. America’s automakers, after all, resisted the electric vehicle transition for years. And the United States also faces some core challenges competing with China on E.V.s: Gasoline may be too cheap here relative to income, and consumers may be too wealthy, for the kind of rapid uptake of these cars we’ve seen in China.
But failing to build a competitive electric vehicle industry would present chronic trade and security concerns for the United States. Within the decade, electric vehicles will be just another type of car, and many countries will encourage people to switch to them. As such, American automakers’ markets will continue to shrink.
More important, batteries are the kind of technology that will ripple across the economy and society, much like lasers, satellites and semiconductors. The military gear of the future — autonomous ships, drone swarms and even short-haul airplanes — will run on low-cost, energy-dense batteries. (Just look at Ukraine’s success at using cheap, battery-powered drones to fight Russia’s invasion to get a sense of how this could play out.) The United States and its allies must be able to spin up the rapid mass production of batteries in a crisis; the electric vehicle industry is how modern-day economies get good at making lots of batteries. Without an electric vehicle industry, without the ability to mass-produce batteries in an emergency, the United States will lose its status as an energy superpower.
It is possible to fall so far behind in an industry that a country cannot reasonably catch up. Europe, for all its wealth and education, has never developed a software industry to rival America’s. Even America’s fossil fuel industry — for all its faults and societal costs — leads the rest of the world in expertise and sheer technical skill. Nobody can frack like us.
But by the same token: Nobody can make a battery like China. The American economy will rely on batteries in the future, just as much — if not more — than it relies on fracking today. The United States is at risk of never learning to produce those batteries and falling ineluctably behind. A Trump victory would help cement that defeat.
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