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

President Joe Biden and Chinese communist party leader Xi Jinping. Illustration by The Epoch Times/Getty Images

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 the 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.”

A rare-earth refinery near the inner Mongolian city of Baotou on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Most of China’s rare earths come from mineral-rich Baotou. Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

‘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.

Emirates check a vehicle manufactured by Electric carmaker Tesla during a ceremony in Dubai, on February 13, 2017. Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images

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.

Aerial view of brine ponds and processing areas of the lithium mine of the Chilean company SQM (Sociedad Quimica Minera) in the Atacama Desert, Calama, Chile, on Sept. 12, 2022. Martin Bernetti/AFP via Getty Images

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.

The EPA, in response to a query from The Epoch Times on whether the new rules will aid China, defended the proposed standards, saying that they are “in line with the direction the American auto industry is already going.” The industry has made significant investments in zero-emissions vehicles, which the administration is building upon, an EPA spokesperson said.

“In addition, there is enormous investment in zero-emissions vehicle technology and chip manufacturing, for example there has been more than $120 billion of private investments in EVs and batteries in the United States since President Biden has taken office,” the spokesperson said.

“With President Biden’s investment in accelerating American zero emission vehicles production, the U.S. is positioned to lead the clean vehicles future.”

‘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.

Kennedy agreed, saying “They are so unrealistic.”

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 created a margin opportunity for producers–and that is where we’re at at this exact moment,” he said.

He provided The Epoch Times with a pre-released paper that he wrote with other experts from around the planet, including rare earth industry insiders who chose to remain anonymous out of concern over the professional consequences of highlighting China’s dominance in that sector.

In it, Kennedy and his colleagues argued that China is positioned to “disrupt the production of close to 100 percent of the world’s REE [rare earth element]-dependent technologies and products, including U.S. weapon systems.”

“Rare earths are critical to many military systems. You’re going to see the same set of problems of needing to loosen permitting requirements in that domain as well,” Schadlow, of the Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times.

Jeremy Catholique, a member of the Lutsel K’e Dene First Nation and shift supervisor at Vital Metals’ Nechalacho rare earth elements mine in the Northwest Territories, overlooks bags of concentrated ore ready to be shipped to the plant in Saskatoon. Bill Braden/Vital Metals

Yet, even just when it comes to commercial vehicles, China’s monopolistic power over critical minerals gives them leverage–and not just over the United States and its domestic automakers.

“At the end of the day, they control the density of the economy of the adversarial country. They quit shipping this material to General Motors or Tesla or Lexus–they’re literally holding a threat over all of these countries,” Kennedy, the mine owner, told The Epoch Times.

The Bigger Picture

Morano said that the EPA’s proposed rules are just the latest effort to boost EVs and end gas-powered cars, not just in the United States, but around the world.

Notably, the EPA rolled them out one year after British climate economist Baron Nicholas Stern told the World Bank that the planet needs “clarity on timescales” for banning the sale of such vehicles.

Oxford, England, has led the way in the “15-minute city” concept, which restricts free markets and free movement in the name of going green.

Meanwhile, various localities in the United States are banning or otherwise heavily restricting the construction of new gas stations.

Alexa Posa of YEG United speaks at a protest against 15-minute cities on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton on Feb. 10, 2023. Courtesy of Alexa Posa

Morano thinks the rules will raise the demand for used cars, as Americans struggle to buy expensive new electric vehicles, all as the cost of charging increases too.

“You can look to Cuba to find out what it’s like to have a raging used car market because that’s what we’re looking at here,” he said.

Kennedy said, “It’s all for an idea that Mother Nature can’t sustain.”

The White House did not return a request for comment.

This article was updated to include a statement from the EPA.