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- Stellantis plans to lay off thousands of workers in Detroit and Ohio in 2024 in order to adjust to California’s strict emission standards, raising concerns that other automakers may have to do the same, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- California has the strictest environmental standards in the country for vehicles and can use its dominant market share to influence broader U.S. trends, coercing automakers to design more expensive cars to fit that market, the experts said.
- “Considering the losses and layoffs we’ve already seen, the effects on the auto industry could be devastating,” Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “Millions of middle-income households are already priced out of the market for new motor vehicles.”
(Daily Caller)—California’s strict emission standards are poised to move the entire auto market towards more expensive, lower-emission vehicles, endangering the American auto industry, which is already posting huge losses in the electric vehicle market, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.Top U.S. car manufacturer Stellantis sent notices to 2,455 workers in Detroit and 1,225 workers in Ohio on Dec. 8, notifying employees of possible layoffs to come in February in a move to shift its production to comply with California’s regulations that are increasingly cracking down on internal combustion engine vehicles, according to Barron’s. The projected layoffs from Stellantis could be one of many in the auto industry as California’s environmental regulations shift markets across the country, despite electric vehicles still not being affordable for many Americans and profitable for automakers, according to experts who spoke to the DCNF.
“The California standards have a huge impact,” Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “Both the [Environmental Protection Agency] in its proposed greenhouse gas motor vehicle standards and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in its proposed corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards cite California’s [zero-emission vehicle] mandate as driving vehicle electrification in the U.S. Moreover, under Clean Air Act Section 177, other states may opt into California’s ZEV and [greenhouse gas] standards — if those policies are lawful in the first place, which of course California and its state and federal agency allies claim is the case.”
California is emboldened by the Environmental Protection Agency’s current standards under the Clean Air Act, which dictates that states must follow the federal government’s vehicle emission standards or opt into California’s more restrictive requirements. California has passed restrictions facilitating the switch away from traditional vehicles, requiring that all new cars, pickups and SUVs be electric or hydrogen-powered by 2035.
“The standards have a large effect because automakers don’t want to make different cars for different states,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “That is why California affects the rest of the country. In addition, another 16 states have voluntarily said they will copy California’s laws.”
NEW:
The Biden administration has highlighted an EV charging company as evidence that its climate agenda is working. Now, the company’s stock is tanking, and the firm faces a class action lawsuit. @DailyCaller News Foundationhttps://t.co/XWSUXbA3IK
— Nick Pope (@realnickpope) December 12, 2023
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously touted the “California Effect,” which dictates that because of the state’s size and market share, it can dominate national trends and influence manufacturers, forcing them to tailor products to the standards or risk missing out on the market entirely, according to The New York Times. The state has the fifth-largest economy in the world.
“Considering the losses and layoffs we’ve already seen, the effects on the auto industry could be devastating,” Lewis told the DCNF. “Millions of middle-income households are already priced out of the market for new motor vehicles. Ford’s F-150 Lightning costs about $14,000 more than the comparable internal combustion engine (ICE) model. Energy analyst Robert Bryce reports that during second quarter 2023, Ford lost $72,762 for every EV it sold, and that in July, Ford projected $4.5 billion in EV-related losses by year’s end—more than double the company’s $2.1 billion EV business losses in 2022.”
Following the losses, Ford sent out a memorandum on Tuesday to suppliers that it was cutting production of its F-150 lightning pickups in 2024 from a weekly target of 3,200 to 1,600 units.
As losses mount for automakers, the Biden administration is pushing for even greater production with subsidies to the EV industry. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act, has instituted a $7,500 tax credit per EV in an attempt to make the cars more affordable.
“The standards will raise the costs of transportation, disproportionately hurting poor people, small businesses and farmers,” Furchtgott-Roth told the DCNF. “Some people like EVs, but others find them to be more expensive, inconvenient to charge, and difficult in cold climates because they lose range. Plus, these EVs make America depend on China. The auto industry is losing money trying to comply with the standards because people are not buying electric vehicles in sufficient quantities.”
While the number of people buying EVs is growing, not enough people are opting into buying an EV to keep up with the rising supply following the regulations and subsidies in the industry. The total volume of EVs sold in January was 3% of new cars, making up 3% of market share, but as of September, volume has risen to 6%, while sales have only risen to 4%.
The current production of EVs requires the use of rare earth minerals, specifically in the vehicle’s battery, with China currently controlling around 87% of the world’s refining capacity for the components. The U.S. has so far been unable to compete in the market, but the Department of Defense has committed millions of dollars to cultivating domestic ventures.
“This agenda is a massive threat to consumer welfare,” Lewis told the DCNF. “In the short term, some automakers may profit from government handouts and the narrowing of competition. In the long term, an industry that does not produce what consumers want at prices they can afford is in big trouble.”
The California governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the DCNF.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
