Sen. Bernie Moreno is floating a new Republican take on why the Biden administration supported electric vehicles: It was duped by China.
“We were ahead of them by a mile, by 10 miles on the internal combustion engine,” the Ohio Republican said at a Washington auto-industry conference last week. But then the Chinese “went into EVs, and then they convinced the Western world to go into EVs and play their game.”
Encouraging the transition away from gasoline-fueled cars “was just an irrational, dumb policy,” Moreno added.
Moreno’s outlook is the latest twist on the common — though not universal — GOP worldview that buying an EV only helps America’s biggest geopolitical adversary.
Today, China is a clear leader in the EV competition. It controls and processes most of the raw materials and precursors for batteries. Sales of its low-cost electric vehicles, made possible by years of government subsidy, are growing in virtually every global market except the U.S., where high tariffs keep them away.
Former President Joe Biden pointed to China’s domination in the EV market as the reason to pursue policies that encouraged the growth of a domestic industry.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that failing to foster EVs had “allowed China to race ahead in the competition to lead the auto industry of the future.”
His administration implemented tax credits and grants that aimed to boost both EV sales and manufacturing — most of which the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have reversed.
A long road
Moreno, who made his fortune as a car dealer, was elected last year, joining a small cadre of mostly conservative former auto salesmen in Congress.
He was among the lawmakers who signed off on President Donald Trump’s agenda to remove nearly every trace of Biden-era support for electric vehicles.
Moreno’s interpretation of why America first turned toward electric vehicles was disputed by Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, which lobbies for EV-affiliated companies.
The threat of competition from all-electric automaker Tesla, starting with the introduction of the Roadster in 2008, got domestic carmakers to start taking EVs seriously, Gore said.
A decade earlier, environmentalists’ desire for a car that didn’t burn fossil fuels gave rise to General Motors’ pioneering EV1 in the mid-1990s. And before that, in the 1980s, American scientists developed the lithium-ion battery that made modern EVs possible.
“We’re talking about things that have been invented here and have been manufactured here in large numbers,” Gore said.
The global market
Doubling down on internal combustion engines might not bode well for U.S. automakers in a global market that is transitioning to EVs. Last year, 29 percent of General Motors’ cars were sold abroad, according to figures from S&P Global Mobility. Ford was even higher, at 41 percent.
“If you put all of your eggs into that [internal combustion] market, and that market struggles, then you have no backstop, you have nowhere to go,” said Stephanie Brinley, an S&P auto analyst.
But Moreno’s take got an endorsement from Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of climate and energy issues at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which developed the Project 2025 policy playbook that has served as a blueprint for the Trump administration.
Policies that support EVs in the U.S., she said, always help China.
The Biden-era rules and subsidies that promoted EVs “means we have to use a Chinese-subsidized product,” she said.
This story also appears in E&E Daily.
