Biden pushes electric vehicle chargers as energy costs spike
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is highlighting billions of dollars in his giant bipartisan infrastructure deal to pay for the installation of electric vehicle chargers across the country, an investment he says will go a long way to curbing planet-warming carbon emissions while creating good-paying jobs.
Biden on Wednesday will visit a General Motors plant in Detroit that manufactures electric vehicles. He’ll use the occasion to make the case that the $7.5 billion in the new infrastructure law for electric vehicle chargers will help America get “off the sidelines” on green-energy manufacturing. Currently, the U.S. market share of plug-in electric vehicle sales is one-third the size of the Chinese EV market.
“It’s a big deal,” Biden declared as he signed the bill into law at a White House ceremony on Monday.
Two top White House advisers, writing in the Detroit Free Press, said the legislation will help America regain its global competitiveness, which has waned, they contend, “after decades of delay and decay.”
“Nobody knows this better than Detroit, which has been at the heart of American industrial strategy in the past and now can again, which is why President Biden is coming today,” wrote Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan in an opinion column published Wednesday.
Republicans, even some of those who voted in favor of the infrastructure package, are criticizing Biden for being preoccupied with electric vehicle technology at a time when Americans are contending with a spike in gasoline and natural gas prices.
Senate Republican leader Mitch Mcconnell took the Senate floor Tuesday to make the case that “the Biden administration doesn’t have any strategic plan to snap its fingers and turn our massive country into some green utopia overnight.”
“They just want to throw boatloads of government money at things like solar panels and electric vehicles and hope it all works out,” said Mcconnell, one of 19 GOP senators who voted in favor of the infrastructure bill. He added, “American families are staring down the barrel of skyrocketing heating bills, and the Democrats’ response is to go to war against affordable American energy.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has stressed that the administration is looking at “every tool in our arsenal” to combat high gasoline prices, saying that Biden and his economic team are “quite focused” on the issue.
Biden has asked the Federal Trade Commission to monitor gasoline prices and address any illegal conduct being observed and is engaging with countries and entities abroad like OPEC on increasing supply.
Biden went a step further on Wednesday, sending a letter asking the FTC chair to consider investigating “whether illegal conduct is costing families at the pump.” The letter noted an “unexplained” gap in the price of unfinished gasoline and prices for consumers at the pump.
The GM plant that Biden will visit was slated to be closed in 2018 as the automaker tried to shed excess factory capacity to build sedans as buyers shifted toward SUVS and trucks. But the plant, which built cars with internal combustion engines since it opened in 1985, was rescued a year later and designated Factory Zero to build zero-emissions electric vehicles.
Currently, the 4.1 millionsquare-foot plant, which straddles the border between Detroit and the enclave of Hamtramck, is making preproduction versions of the electric GMC Hummer pickup truck.