President Biden’s policy requiring 67 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States by 2032 to be electric vehicles (EVs) will only continue to benefit the Chinese monopoly over the market.
China has become the largest electric vehicle battery producer in the world by “figuring out how to make battery components efficiently and at lower costs,” explains the New York Times.
China is, moreover, the world leader in the manufacturing of EVs by some distance. By 2030, China will manufacture more than double the number of EVs than all other nations combined.
Most of the raw materials that support the batteries are refined by the Chinese Communist Party, such as lithium, manganese, cobalt, graphite, and nickel, compared to the United States, which has “little processing capacity” for raw materials.
The most important component in an EV is the cathode – a battery’s positive terminal which is responsible for costs and range – and yet the United States manufactures one percent of them.
To meet Biden’s strategic goals, therefore, the United States must depend more on the Chinese for its EV supply.
As Scott Kennedy argues, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “[t]here is no way anybody is going to become successful in electric vehicles without having some type of cooperation with China, either directly or indirectly.”
