(AIER)—The Biden administration last week rolled out new emissions regulations that the New York Times said will “transform the American automobile market.”
In what the paper called “one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is mandating that a majority of new passenger vehicles sold in America be hybrids or EVs by 2032.
The Biden administration and defenders of the policy argue that the EPA’s regulation is “not a ban” on gas-powered cars, since carmakers are not prohibited from producing gas-powered vehicles. Instead, automakers are required to meet a government-mandated “average emissions limit” across their entire vehicle line, to force them to produce more EVs and fewer gas-powered cars.
It’s a clever ruse in that it allows the Biden administration to use regulatory power to force automobile manufactures off of gas-powered vehicles while denying that they are banning them.
Whatever one chooses to call the regulation, its purpose is clear.
“Make no mistake,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “This is a coerced phase-out of gas-powered cars.”
This might be music to the ears of those who see fossil fuels as evil, but economics and history suggest the White House’s plan to force Americans off of gas-powered cars could be a disaster.
What’s Holding Up EV Adoption?
A major reason why the White House is forcing this “transformation of the American automobile market” is that Americans aren’t voluntarily adopting EVs quickly enough to satisfy the White House.
Though Americans purchased more than a million EVs last year, that still represents less than 8 percent of total vehicle sales in the US. The government’s current target is 56 percent. (If the White House was serious about speeding up this transition, it might consider eliminating the 25 percent tariff on cars built in China — which accounts for some 60 percent of global EV sales — but that would be too easy.)
Despite massive subsidies encouraging consumers to purchase EVs, Americans didn’t buy them as rapidly as predicted, causing auto companies to pump the brakes. Ford recently announced it was halving production of its most popular EV, the F-150 Lightning. General Motors, the largest US automaker, and Toyota, the second-largest US automaker, followed suit, announcing significant reductions in EV production.
The weak demand for electric vehicles no doubt has several sources, but the BBC identified a few primary reasons, two of which appear over and over in consumer surveys: price and charging reliability.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning starts at $50,000. Its popular Mach-e starts at $40,000, and that’s after a recent $8,100 mark-down. GM’s top-selling EV, the LYRIQ, starts at $59,000. On average, EVs sell for about $5,000 more than similar gas-powered cars. And EV prices are going up, not down, researchers point out.
“In 2011, the inflation-adjusted price of a new EV was near $44,000. By 2022, that price had risen to over $66,000,” said Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, in her testimony to Congress in 2023.
The second problem is that Americans have serious concerns about how they’ll charge their EVs. A 2023 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that 77 percent of respondents cited concerns about charging stations as a reason for not purchasing an EV.
This is not an irrational concern.
When Americans drive their gas-powered cars, they are not worried about where they’ll fill up when their fuel runs low. Gas stations are plentiful in the US and easy to find. Charging stations are another matter.
Bloomberg reported last year that, despite steady growth in recent years of EV charging stations, there is just one quick-turn electrical vehicle charge station in the US for every 16 gasoline stations.
Federal efforts to expand charging infrastructure, including $7.5 billion in new spending to build half a million stations, have been embarrassingly slow.
‘Subsidizing EVs With Profits From Gas-Powered Cars’
Since Americans are not voluntarily adopting EVs as quickly as the government would like, the EPA is trying to hasten the transition. This could be a disastrous move.
As the Journal noted, Ford last year lost nearly $5 billion on its EV business. Yet the company still managed to generate a $4.3 billion profit in 2023. It doesn’t take a math genius to deduce how this happened.
“[Automobile] companies are heavily subsidizing EVs with profits from gas-powered cars,” the Journal notes.
Forcing automobile companies to expand production of their least-profitable product lines at the expense of their best-performing ones is economic madness. It calls to mind collectivized agricultural policies in the Soviet Union, where central planners embraced the worst farming methods.
While Stalin’s collectivization of farms in 1929 was a massive failure that led to the deaths of millions, agriculture in the USSR of course continued during and after his lifetime. But two distinct sectors emerged: a tiny private sector that produced a bumper crop of food, and a massive collectivized sector that produced very little.
The late economist James D. Gwartney (1940–2024) explained that families living on collectives in the USSR were allowed to farm on small private plots (no more than one acre) and sell their produce in a mostly free market.
Historians point out that in the 1960s these tiny private farms, which accounted for just 3 percent of the sown land in the USSR, produced 66 percent of its eggs, 64 percent of the potatoes, 43 percent of its vegetables, 40 percent of meat, and 39 percent of its milk.
Gwartney and economist Richard Lyndell Stroup note that by 1980, private farms accounted for just one percent of sown land in the USSR, but a quarter of its agricultural output.
“The productivity per acre on the private plots was approximately 33 times higher than that on the collectively farmed land!” they wrote.
In a free-market economy, farmers within the Soviet Union would have been allowed to shift toward private production — just like US automakers today would be allowed to shift away from EVs until the industry becomes more profitable.
But… the Environment?
Supporters of the Biden policy are likely to respond that we have no choice but to transition to EVs because of climate change. There are several problems with this argument.
For starters, EVs are not the green panacea they seem to be. Electrical vehicles actually require a massive amount of energy and strip mining. Half a million pounds of rock and minerals have to be mined to build just one battery, on average. EVs require far more energy and cause far more pollution when they are manufactured than gas-powered automobiles.
“[I]t’s true that the production of a BEV (battery electric vehicle) causes more pollution than a gasoline-powered counterpart,” the New York Times admitted in a 2022 article headlined “EVs Start With a Bigger Carbon Footprint. But That Doesn’t Last.”
If you weren’t aware that EVs cause more pollution on the production side than gas-powered cars, don’t be embarrassed; few do. It’s one of the dirty secrets of EVs: they start with an enormous carbon footprint. At a climate summit a few years ago, Volvo noted its C40 Recharge had to be driven about 70,000 miles before its total carbon footprint was smaller than the gas-powered version.
As the Times says, the footprint of EVs shrinks over time. But not as fast as many think. One big reason for this is that the bulk of the electricity produced in the US is produced by… you guessed it… fossil fuels. As the Energy Information Administration points out, fossil fuels generate about 60 percent of the electricity in the US, which means that most people charging their EVs are using electricity generated from fossil fuels.
Reducing that carbon footprint is also exacerbated by the fact that people tend to rack up fewer miles with EVs than gas-powered vehicles, which makes it more difficult to offset the large carbon footprint on the production side.
“[Our] data show that electric vehicles are driven considerably less on average than gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles,” researchers at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley noted in a 2019 study. “In the complete sample, electric vehicles are driven an average of 7,000 miles per year, compared to 10,200 for gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles.”
All of this helps explain why a 2023 Wall Street Journal analysis found that shifting all personal US vehicles to electric power would barely make a dent in global CO2 emissions, reducing them by less than 0.2 percent.
Who Chooses?
Forcing US automakers to expand their least-profitable autolines is backward economics. It puts automakers at risk, not to mention their workers and shareholders.
The higher profits automakers are reaping from gas-powered vehicles isn’t an accident. It’s a signal that consumers prefer them at the prices being offered, and heeding consumers is what separates capitalism from the failed collectivist systems of the past.
The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that in a free-market economy, it’s the consumers who ultimately call the shots, not the state or even the corporations. This idea is known as consumer sovereignty.
“The real bosses [under capitalism] are the consumers,” Mises wrote in Bureaucracy. “They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.”
The real question here isn’t about which is better, gas-powered cars or EVs. It’s about who gets to choose.
By allowing unelected regulators to decide what kind of cars are built instead of consumers, the US is crossing an ominous line.
This kind of central planning failed miserably in the 20th century. Don’t expect it to be any different this time around.
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.
