Trump Puts Consumers Back in the Driver’s Seat

F lanked by Republican lawmakers and the representatives of U.S. automakers in the Oval Office yesterday, Donald Trump called Joe Biden’s electric-vehicle mandates and emissions standards a “scam.” Indeed, the previous administration’s rules “forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices, and made the car much worse,” the president said. As a result, “people were paying too much for a car that didn’t work as well.”

Trump is right about that.

Biden’s fight against climate change led his administration to force carmakers to promise that 67 percent of new light-duty vehicles and 46 percent of medium-duty vehicles would be electric by 2032 (at a time when electric-vehicle sales accounted for just 7 percent of the car market). In addition, Biden imposed new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that would require EVs and hybrid vehicles to get at least 62 miles per gallon. Gasoline-powered cars would be compelled to achieve a standard of 50 miles per gallon.

These imperious impositions on the private sector made all cars, combustion and electric alike, more expensive. But at least, if you purchased an electric car in the Biden era, you could qualify for a $7,500 tax credit — a federal subsidy for those who were probably already financially comfortable so they could purchase a high-end good at the expense of consumers who could afford only a conventional car, tax credit or no. So Biden managed to wed economic illiteracy with an obvious moral hazard. Something had to be done.

Biden’s unrealistic emissions limits and efforts to artificially prop up electric vehicles that couldn’t otherwise compete in the market distorted the price for new and used cars and limited consumer options.

Doing away with those standards will increase efficiency in the car market. Consumers will once again have the liberty to reward the firms that are the best performers in that sector, not just the best connected — keeping more of their own money in the process, which they can subsequently use to patronize other high-performing and efficient businesses. That’s how the market keeps prices low, and it’s good to see the Trump administration embracing the logic of consumer capitalism.

This is all good news for car buyers. The New York Times is, however, less than thrilled with this turn of events. “Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States,” the paper complained. Cutting Biden’s emissions standards down to something more realistic will allow carmakers to sell more “gas guzzlers” like SUVs and pickup trucks, which are both “more profitable” for carmakers and, left unsaid, far more popular among consumers. “The changes also push the United States further out of sync with the rest of the world,” the Times mourned. While Europe forges ahead with lithium-ion vehicles, America languishes — reliant on fossil fuels in ways that save money, sure, but “at a price to public health and the environment.”

The fact that the Times is compelled to make the case against Joe Biden’s emissions and EV mandates not on their merits but on the degree to which they affect everything – from every individual’s health to the global climate – gives away the game. The Biden administration’s crusade against fossil fuels was just as universal in scope.

From the outset, the last administration went to war against fossil fuels and the industries that rely on them. It shut down oil and gas leasing on federal lands. It directed executive agencies to eliminate spending that could potentially subsidize fossil fuel industries. It forced developers to abandon transit-pipeline projects. It tried and failed (failed only because of the public backlash) to ban natural gas hookups in new construction, with the aim of forcing the market to phase out appliances powered by natural gas.

Biden and his allies were savvy enough to avoid admitting in plain terms what they were trying to do with these policies, but their environmentalist allies were far less discrete. “If you restrict the supply (of oil and gas), you alter the market and you create a better environment for more sustainable fuels,” said New York University professor Max Sarinsky.

Within a year of Biden’s taking office, and perhaps motivated by the upward pressure that Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest had put on global energy prices, his administration began slinking away from its war on fossil fuels. It relaxed the executive order putting a halt to new oil and gas leases on federal lands. It eased up on the political pressure it had put on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a surrender marked by Biden’s conciliatory trip to Riyadh. (The Kingdom had responded to Biden administration’s earlier hectoring by balking at the White House’s request to increase crude oil production.) The administration dispatched Energy Secretary Jennnifer Granholm to beg American fossil fuel producers to boost their own production right after it had scoffed at the notion that more production would lower energy prices.

The plan failed, but that doesn’t mean there never was a plan. “Look,” said then–White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, “our view is that the rise in gas prices over the long term makes an even stronger case for doubling down our investment and our focus on clean energy options.” Increasing the cost of fuels and the conveniences that run on them would, in theory, compel consumers to reluctantly transition to electric alternatives. That was the campaign of social engineering that Biden’s electric vehicle and emissions mandates were designed to advance. It’s what Donald Trump has blessedly reversed.

The Biden administration’s war wasn’t against heat-trapping emissions. It was a war against consumers and their damnable preferences. It was a war that Biden and his allies lost long before Trump repealed the market-distorting burdens Biden imposed on the car market. If yesterday’s Oval Office ceremony had the feel of a victory lap, it’s because that’s what it was.