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.
