Force-Feeding U.S. Electric Vehicles . . . Despite The Downsides

The Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandate has come—in the form of an Environmental Protection Agency emissions rule.

Biden’s EPA leaves no doubt that forcing internal-combustion-powered vehicles off the road is the ultimate goal. The rule dictates that no more than 30% of vehicles sold in 2032 may run on gasoline. The bureaucrats do this by throttling down the amount of tailpipe emissions. Car manufacturers will have to build four EVs for every internal-combustion vehicle by 2032.

The ugliest of ugly faces of the Administrative State hath spoken—and it denies consumer choice and competition, market-based production and product offerings. The iron fist of Big Government has slammed the table.

The U.S. government forcing private-sector companies to stop providing the types of vehicles American consumers want certainly is un-American and violates property rights on multiple levels.

How do we know that consumers don’t want EVs? The few early adopters pretty much all have EVs. And they’re wealthy. Which is critical because most EVs sold in the United States are Teslas or other luxury brands. Less than 8% of last year’s U.S. vehicle sales were EVs—which means more than 90% of 2023 autos sold were gas-powered or hybrid.

Car dealers see EVs occupy valuable space on the lot and in the showroom. EVs lose money for auto companies. What are selling are gas-engine trucks and cars and hybrids, which run on both electric and gas power.

Why don’t most Americans want EVs? They’re expensive. Charging their batteries costs more than a tank of gas, and is a lot slower. Their maintenance and repairs cost more. Resale value remains uncertain; used car lots have many EVs that they can’t unload.

EVs are less dependable. Consumers complain that EVs’ features such as door locks and window switches stop working, while batteries die faster in cold weather and some won’t charge. A Dallas doctor told the Wall Street Journal the family Tesla “often requires a full night of charging at home, and even then, its range on a single charge often fell below estimates displayed by the vehicle.” EV models have had recalls due to one malfunction or defect or another.

And there’s greater risk of EVs catching on fire.

A Consumer Reports survey last fall reported 79% more problems with EVs than consumers have had with vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines.

Then there’s the fraud of EVs being “environmentally friendly.” Mining the minerals and manufacturing the batteries cause particulate emissions, while the heavier, battery-operated EVs degrade roads, which pollutes.

EVs draw an unfair share of the electricity infrastructure, risking energy security and reliability while increasing energy consumption.

Holman Jenkins writes: “Norway has seen no decline in oil consumption related to EVs, though users receive thousands of dollars in annually recurring subsidies and EVs accounted [in 2022] for 64% of new-car sales.

“The reason is increased use and ownership of gas-powered cars, especially for trips that EVs aren’t suited for.

“Now comes an update from the natural-resource consultants Goehring & Rozencwajg that . . . [d]espite some of the greenest electricity on Earth, a Norwegian still needs to get 45 years of use out of his imported EV battery (expected life 15 years) to offset the global CO2 cost of producing it.”

Jenkins, an astute Journal columnist, shines the light on what Al Gore might call “inconvenient facts” for his and Biden’s hypocritical ecosanctimony. Consider: “[T]he vehicles you and I drive, while large in number, sit parked 95% of the time and play a minor role in U.S. transportation emissions.

“It elides the fact that U.S. transportation emissions themselves are a small and shrinking share of global emissions.

“On the friendliest assumptions, the Biden plan would reduce global emissions by 0.18%. But the friendly assumptions are false because . . . every electric vehicle doesn’t displace a conventional one, every electric mile driven doesn’t displace a gasoline mile.”

Then there’s the economics. They suck for EVs and steal from internal-combustion vehicle buyers. Established automakers lose tens of thousands of dollars on each EV they sell. So those companies hike the prices on popular, selling autos. Jenkins notes that “GM has been enjoying some highly profitable quarters thanks to five-figure markups on pickups.” News flash: It’s not just GM robbing Peter to pay Paul.

EV startups are burning money, and each sale comes at a loss. Many if not most could go bankrupt before the Biden EV mandate can save them.

This charade has become Detroit’s game, thanks to Obama, Biden, Califoney and ecozealots. These criminals are more Rube Goldberg than Milton Friedman. The damage they’re inflicting on Americans at such an exorbitant fiscal and social cost to achieve a negligible 0.18% reduction in global emissions is unconscionable.

The Piracy Website-Blocking Solution

Digital commercial piracy costs the United States economy at least $29.2 billion a year. That is, if commercial piracy websites paid for the content they’ve illicitly streamed, creators of music, movies, TV shows and other digital content would have earned about $30 billion more yearly.

At a recent hearing of the House Intellectual Property Subcommittee, site-blocking garnered bipartisan support. Subcommittee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and other lawmakers agreed that as technology has changed since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, there’s a great need for antipiracy measures.

The entertainment industry accounts for $230.5 billion in exports annually, Adam Mossoff writes in a Heritage Foundation report. "The creative industries are a major driver of economic growth and jobs, adding $1.8 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and employing 9.6 million Americans in 2021.” This isn’t chump change.

"Copyright piracy, like a squatter in one’s home or a digital thief continually stealing money from one’s bank account or credit card, undermines a creator’s rights to liberty and property to live, work in a profession, and make a living," Mossoff says.

This form of copyright infringement on such a commercial scale is hardly a victimless crime. It’s missing from paychecks and tax revenue, and deprives writers, artists and creators working on the next creative endeavor.

Commercial-level, global piracy affects the livelihoods of millions of people. It steals from those holding U.S. jobs in film and TV, for instance. These range from studio executives to hairdressers, theater owners and all sorts of off-camera roles across the country.

Currently, under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it’s costly and time-consuming to fight piracy.

"We spend . . . hundreds and millions of dollars to develop notice and takedown systems to send millions of notices to various [user-generated content] sites. Individual artists and creators often don't have the ability and resources to do that, so it is a very difficult situation for individual creators, and that is something that has often been discussed with respect to the DMCA," said hearing witness Karyn Temple, senior counsel at the Motion Picture Association.

There’s hope, though. Some 34 nations are seeing effective, efficient results stopping digital piracy. These countries plus another 12 have enacted laws that enable website blocking.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s report on site-blocking says site-blocking countries include Germany, India, Australia, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom, among others.

The way it works involves judicial process and oversight. Copyright owners obtain injunctions that ask Internet service providers to block access to piracy websites that mass-distribute copyright-infringing content.

Most of these laws block both the primary site and secondary sites that mirror the contents of the primary site; this is called dynamic blocking injunction. This approach ends the whack-a-mole multiple injunctions route. Some site-blocking laws go after streaming live events.

Over the past decade, European courts have developed a mature legal framework for site-blocking. ITIF finds its principles instructive: “Piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay make acts of communication to the public and thereby are liable for copyright infringement. . . . The Pirate Bay’s central role in facilitating piracy means it is not protected by the same legal provisions that protect websites for being held responsible for user-posted content (i.e., a legal safe harbor). . . . There was no doubt that The Pirate Bay’s activities were carried out with the purpose of obtaining a profit.”

To be clear: This illicit practice is big, illegal business involving thousands of websites worldwide. The players are big-time criminal enterprises. The sites provide illicit access to stolen commercial digital contents. There’s no censorship or viewpoint discrimination involved here; it’s all about stopping international criminals from making big money off of stolen goods.

These laws block some 18,000 illicit sites globally, and that’s just for movies. Many other blocked sites illegally provide music, video games and other intellectual property-protected content.

Research in several of the countries with site-blocking laws shows that this approach, especially dynamic and live blocking, effectively cuts off access to illegal streaming and downloads.

"The U.S. is now the outlier globally when it comes to site-blocking systems and the protection of the rights of creators in the digital fruits of their labors," with more than 40 countries using some form of site blocking, Mossoff says.

The studies also show that site-blocking changes consumer behavior. Australian studies give an excellent example.

ITIF reports: “Users will visit a piracy website if it is a top search result ahead of legal options, but if they only find legal options, then that is where they will go. This survey and the MPA study support the case for broad and consistent blocking of major piracy sites, and working with search engines to stop them from providing easy access to piracy sites.”

Thus, blocking access through court-issued injunctions and carried out through ISPs has proven to be a highly effective remedy against this form of copyright infringement on a commercial scale. And site-blocking doesn’t stifle free speech.

To date, there’s no U.S. site-blocking law. There needs to be.

Bernie Convenes a Gang Beating

Senate HELP Chairman Bernie Sanders has kept busy strongarming biopharma company executives. Sanders threatened to subpoena those who wouldn’t willingly submit to a public flogging in his star chamber.

The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions has called a hearing for February 8, titled “Authorization for Investigation into the High Costs of Prescription Drugs and Related Subpoenas.” There politicians will grandstand on the price difference of medicines in foreign government-run health systems and the United States.

Three biopharma CEOs have agreed to appear at the bullying fest—the third such gang flogging in Sanders’s committee, beating the same worn-out drum and demonizing representatives from one of the world’s and America's most innovative, valuable industrial sectors.

It’s suspected that Sanders called this meeting to punish America’s pharma innovators, whose private investment into drug discovery and development leads the world. They have the audacity to sue the Biden administration over its opaque manner of implementing the “Inflation Reduction Act’s” drug price “negotiation” measures and the unfair, heavy-handed design of the scheme. There’s no actual negotiation to it, and the IRA’s price control scheme may very well violate the companies’ constitutional rights.

At the hearing, Sanders and his colleagues will badger the executives, as they have before, goad them, twist anything they say that doesn’t fit the Left’s narrative.

Meanwhile, Sanders and a disturbing number of Senators will miss an opportunity for honest, factual inquiry and assessment of the lack of transparency government-controlled health systems operate under.

Shouldn’t U.S. lawmakers in what once was known as the world’s most august legislative body instead defend American innovators against socialist elements of foreign health systems that cheat U.S. interests?

U.S. Senators could investigate how and why other countries’ government-run health systems don’t pay their fair share of the costs that these private firms—many American—bear to bring forth new cures and therapies. Those labors typically take a few billion dollars to discover and develop a single new drug approved to market. About nine out of 10 prospective new medicines don’t cross the finish line.

Instead, expect to see Sanders and his cronies drill the biopharma execs so as to tee up importing foreign price controls into the U.S. health system as their preferred “solution.” Sanders and company have this exactly backwards. Forcing foreign health systems to pay their fair share for drugs is a better solution.

But HELP’s flogging appears geared to push an “international price index” or “most favored nation” scheme—where the government sets U.S. prices of drugs based on some average of certain foreign countries’ prices.

That’s guaranteed to stifle American innovation in this space and destroy good-paying American jobs. It also gives China, which has named biopharma as one of the technologies of which it wants to be global leader, a decided advantage.

Sen. Sanders doesn’t understand, or else ignores, that he’s hounding the wrong side. He should be going after “foreign freeloaders,” not American innovators.

President Trump took the same missteps, and conservatives let him know it. Trump griped about “foreign freeloaders,” but proposed importing foreign-government price controls as reckless and radical as Sanders’s. They got the diagnosis right, but their remedy would kill the patient—American health care’s effectiveness and American health care consumers.

Price controls on medicines, from the Left or the populist side, will most certainly hurt patients and undermine innovation.

One more thing Sen. Sanders and others planning to gang up on the biopharma executives might consider: In witch-hunt hearings in our Congress’s history, the conveners usually come out in history’s analysis as thugs, bullies, etc. Those they skewer come off as sympathetic victims, once the fiery political moment has passed.