Let’s face it, the Chinese are running the EV market. They produce over half the EVs manufactured, but more importantly, they control the critical supply lines of the materials needed to build the most critical part of an EV, the battery.
They not only have a strangle hold on lithium, mining it freely in China, but they also own many of the other sources of the critical rare earth. They manufacture nearly 70% of the vehicle batteries. It should be noted that battery manufacture is a messy business, and the Chinese don’t seem to care that they make a mess.
As we run pall mall into an all electric world, shouldn’t we stop for a moment and consider just what we are doing for a country that has declared itself our enemy.
Consider one aspect. What if, down the road, the Chinese decide to double or triple the price of the batteries. We are committed to the EV, and now our supply lines are strangled. We have shut down production of ICE vehicles. Whoops.
My favorite law, that of unintended consequences raises its ugly head. I mentioned before that when we let the government pick winners and losers, it doesn’t do a very good job. Can you say Solyndra, or Enron. In this case it’s not just loaning money, but it is forcing a product on the public, setting impossible goals, and setting up entire industries for failure.
Wouldn’t we be better off if we let the marketplace move at its own pace, let the technology keep pace with demand, and let EVs grow at a pace manufacturers can keep up with.
Then the Chinese might be left holding a very expensive bag.
JVH
2 Responses
It is hard to believe that anyone could think it is a worthy policy for a nation like ours to entrust crucial services like oil and gas to other countries that might not be our friends. You want to weaken our country cut off our oil. Most of you are not old enough to remember the 1979 Arab Oil Embargo. Overnight the price of a barrel of oil more than doubled. The supply of oil to the world dropped and in the US we had to go on oil rationing. You could only purchase fuel on certain days of the week and you could only purchase a limited number of gallons at a time. The lines at the gas stations were a quarter of a mile long and this was caused by a part of the world that we had a lot of influence over. While EV’s may possibly be the future of transportation, we are fools if we don’t think through how we are going to get to this future. Nothing wrong with the transition to EV’s except for some issues that we can overcome except for allowing an enemy to control the ability to make it move down the road.
Just one thing that’s inaccurate in your blog., JVH: it’s the law of INTENDED consequences, not unintended. As James Forrestal, the first Sec DOD said (some time before being helped out of the window of his Bethesda Naval Hospital room), if the people running the government were just stupid, they’d occasionally make a mistake in our favor.
One cannot look at the policies of the WEF, UN, the WHO, woke corporatists and this deep-state controlled Administration this is both pushing and implementing their “one world” authoritarian policies and critically conclude that what we are living through are unintended consequences. A better term would be “engineered decline”, or maybe “controlled demolition”.
As the tag line from The X-Files went, “the truth is out there”. We need many more people to overcome their cognitive dissonance and wake up to the the totalitarian future that awaits us unless we act to reclaim our national sovereignty, a large part of which will be determined by our energy independence.
PS: I greatly appreciate the free-speech forum your blog and PT provide!