President Biden wants more of America’s cars and trucks to run on electricity, not natural gas. His administration has pushed that goal on multiple fronts, including tough new auto emissions regulations and plenty of new subsidies to help American consumers shave up to $7,500 off the cost of a new electric vehicle.
Aides to Mr. Biden agree that electric vehicles — which sell for more than $53,000 on average in the United States — would sell even faster here if they were less expensive. As it happens, there is a wave of new electric vehicles that are significantly cheaper than what customers can currently buy in the United States. They are proving extremely popular in Europe.
But the president and his team don’t want Americans to buy these cheap cars, which retail elsewhere for as little as $10,000, because they’re made in China. That’s true even though an increase in imported low-cost electric vehicles may help lower car prices overall, potentially helping Mr. Biden in his re-election campaign at a time when inflation remains a top economic concern for voters.
Instead, the president is taking steps to make Chinese electric vehicles prohibitively expensive, largely to protect American automakers. Mr. Biden signed an executive act earlier this month that quadruples tariffs on those cars to 100 percent.
These tariffs will put many potential Chinese imports at a significant cost disadvantage to American-made electric vehicles. But some models, such as the discount BYD Seagull, could cost less than some American competitors even after tariffs, which is one reason Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and some other Democrats have asked Mr. Biden to completely ban Chinese EV imports.
The apparent conflict between climate concerns and American manufacturing has upset some environmentalists and liberal economists, who say the country and the world would be better off if Mr. Biden welcomed the introduction of low-cost, low-emission technologies to combat of climate change.
Mr. Biden and his aides reject that criticism. They say the president’s efforts to curb Chinese electric cars and other clean technology imports are a major blow to Beijing’s illegal and harmful trade practices.
And they insist that Mr. Biden’s trade approach will ultimately benefit American jobs and national security — along with the planet.
Here are the politics and policy considerations driving Mr. Biden’s effort to protect American producers from Chinese competition.
Denial in Beijing a new monopoly
China already dominates basic clean energy production in areas such as solar cells and batteries. Mr. Biden’s aides want to prevent it from gaining monopolies in similar industries, such as electric vehicles, for several reasons.
They include climate concerns. Administration officials say Chinese factories, which tend to run on fossil fuels like coal, produce more greenhouse gas emissions than American factories.
There is also a central economic reason to deny China a monopoly: ensuring that electric cars and trucks will always be available, at competitive prices. The Covid-19 pandemic has driven home the fragility of global supply chains, as critical products such as semiconductors became difficult to obtain from China and other Asian nations on which the United States relied. Prices of consumer electronics and other products that relied on imported materials soared, fueling inflation.
Biden officials want to avoid a similar scenario for electric vehicles. Centralizing the supply of electric vehicles and other advanced green technology to China would jeopardize “the world’s collective ability to access the technologies we need to be successful in a clean energy economy,” said Ali Zaidi, the country’s national climate adviser. Mr. Biden.
Strengthening national security
Biden officials say they are not trying to bring the entire global electric vehicle supply chain to the United States. They strike deals with allies to supply minerals for advanced batteries, for example, and encourage countries in Europe and elsewhere to subsidize their own domestic production of clean technology. But they are particularly concerned about the security implications of a major rival like China dominating space.
The government has launched investigations into the software and hardware risks of future imported smart cars — electric or not — from China that could track Americans’ locations and report back to Beijing. Liberal economists also worry about the prospect of China cutting off access to new cars or their key components for strategic purposes.
Allowing China to dominate EV production risks repeating the longstanding economic and safety challenges of gasoline cars, said Elizabeth Pancotti, director of special initiatives at the liberal Roosevelt Institute in Washington, which has cheered Mr. Biden’s industrial policy efforts. .
Americans have struggled for decades to deal with decisions by often hostile oil-producing countries, acting as part of the OPEC cartel, to cut production and raise gasoline prices. China could wreak similar havoc on the electric car market if it drives other countries out of the business, he said.
If that happens, he said, “reversal will be very difficult.”
Biden needs the energy transition to create jobs
There is no doubt that politics also play a huge role in Mr. Biden’s decisions. Simply put: He promises his climate plan will create jobs — good-paying manufacturing jobs, including in critical states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Mr. Biden is a staunch supporter of organized labor and is counting on union votes to help win those states. He has pledged that the energy transition will give unionists a boost. He is betting that their support for tariffs meant to protect American manufacturing jobs will overshadow any complaints from environmentalists who want faster progress in reducing emissions.
“One of the constituent groups of the Democratic Party that is really very organized, that gets people knocking on doors, is the labor movement, more so than the environmental movement,” said Todd Watson, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and author of “Clean Air and Good Jobs: US Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice.”
Those concerns have been greatly alleviated since many clean energy jobs are at new companies where workers are not unionized, he added.
Mr. Biden put those concerns front and center when he announced his decision on tariffs last week.
“In 2000, when cheap steel from China started flooding the market, US steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” he told the White House. “Iron and steel workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio lost their jobs. I’m not going to let it happen again.”
David Gelles contributed reporting from New York.
