IN-DEPTH: Biden’s EV Plan Could Be Key to China’s Global Economic Dominance

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “strongest-ever” vehicle emissions standards designed to drive mass adoption of electric cars within a decade will increase the United States’ dependence on China, experts warn.

“It benefits the Chinese Communist Party because they control the critical minerals supply chain that is going to be necessary to build out the batteries for those electric vehicles,” said Mandy Gunasekara, director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank, in an April 17 interview with The Epoch Times.

Gunasekara served as chief of staff in the EPA under former President Donald Trump. She argued that the Trump administration did a better job of integrating environmental, economic, and strategic considerations than the Biden team, including when it came to the critical minerals used in electric vehicles (EVs) and other technologies.

“There was a concerted effort to ensure we weren’t setting regulations that shut down industrial activity here in the United States, knowing good and well that productivity doesn’t go away—it just materializes somewhere else, and typically a place like China,” she said.

The agency anticipates that with the new standards, two-thirds of new light-body vehicles will be electric by the model year 2032, up from less than six percent today.

The proposed rules, which would go into effect with cars from model year 2027 onward, target tailpipe emissions from light-, medium-, and heavy-body vehicles.

The EPA claims the standards would “significantly reduce climate and other harmful air pollution, unlocking significant benefits for public health, especially in communities that have borne the greatest burden of poor air quality.”

‘Industrial Suicide’

“This is industrial suicide,” said James Kennedy, a U.S. mine owner and rare earths expert, in an April 17 interview with The Epoch Times.

“By design, their goal is to wipe out, to destroy, to effectively terminate the massive economic investment that the auto companies have made in the internal combustion engine,” he said.

He outlined China’s long-range, strategic plan to dominate the mining and refining of rare earths, as well as the production of downstream technologies.

“No one in the West will accept the reality that China has total domain control at every level,” he added.

The rare earth metals terbium, holmium, and dysprosium are one key choke point for Chinese control over EV production.

Kennedy explained that the elements enable neodymium magnets to function at the high temperatures found in the motors of electric cars.

“China is the only country in the world, period, exclamation point, that can separate those materials,” he said.

U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry has emphasized what he sees as the urgent need to cooperate with China in fighting climate change, recently informing Axios that talks between the powers have stalled due to escalating geostrategic tensions.

In Gunasekara’s view, the Chinese Communist Party has succeeded by banking on the Democrats’ climate agenda, which generally goes far beyond what Republicans advocate.

“They’re the ones who, at the end of the day, get to profit off of our bad policies,” she said.

Conflict Within Biden Administration

Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who served on the National Security Council under Trump, thinks the Biden administration is not entirely off track regarding critical minerals and other materials that go into EVs.

“We should be giving the administration credit for pushing the onshoring of these important and critical inputs,” she told The Epoch Times in an April 17 interview.

Along these lines, the Department of Energy on April 4 announced $16 million in funding for a rare earth and critical minerals extraction and separation refinery.

“President Biden’s Investing in America agenda is helping reduce our overreliance on adversarial nations and positioning the country as a global manufacturing leader,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in an accompanying statement.

Last February, the administration announced $35 million in funding to Nevade-based MP Materials, which operates the country’s only rare earths mine in Mountain Pass, California.

Rare earths also figured in Biden’s February 2021 executive order on America’s supply chains, and in February 2022 remarks at a roundtable on bolstering America’s supply chains, when he listed them among the critical materials that are “badly needed for so many American products.”

“The problem is, they’re in conflict with some of the other parts of the administration that are less concerned about the competition with China and more focused on traditional environmental issues,” Schadlow said.

Like others who spoke with The Epoch Times, she drew attention to the slow pace of mine permitting.

“If there is a disconnect with actual capabilities–whether charging stations around the country or minerals sources in the United States or in allied countries–then the timing just does not seem to work,” she said.

Gunasekara stressed the need for effective presidential leadership, given China’s fundamental challenge to the United States.

“I do think it’s going to take a strategic initiative from the top to address this situation, because it hasn’t been addressed in past years. There’s a lot of small decisions that will have to be made to ensure that the United States isn’t shifting reliance on OPEC into reliance on the Chinese Communist Party,” she said.

‘China Empowerment Plan’

“The Biden EPA plan is the China empowerment plan,” said Marc Morano, executive director of ClimateDepot.com, a project of the Washington-based think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, in an April 17 interview with The Epoch Times.

Morano, like other experts who spoke with The Epoch Times, questioned the EPA’s ambitious projections of large-scale EV adoption within ten years.

“The plan, if it actually goes forward, will create chaos in the automobile industry,” Morano said.

“They are so unrealistic,” Kennedy said.

He pointed out that the mass adoption of EVs and other green technologies would require extraordinarily high quantities of lithium, rare earths, copper, and other minerals.

“There’s just not enough of these materials to go around,” he said.

Kennedy also voiced skepticism about claims that China’s hold on rare earths has relaxed, now that their production has fallen to as low as 60 percent of the global total.

“China raised the margins available to resource producers to the point where they would go out, develop projects, and start shipping to China. China didn’t want to pollute its country anymore or exhaust its resources, so it cre