Electric Vehicles

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, since President Biden took office, he and our Democratic colleagues have been on a mission--a mission to replace every car in America with an electric vehicle.

Think about that for a minute. There are 280 million cars on the road in America, and our colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle want to replace every single internal combustion engine with a big battery with wheels on it, known as an electric vehicle. They are determined to please the Green New Deal enthusiasts by shoveling mountains of taxpayer money into this effort, and they are making some headway.

Last summer, our Democratic colleagues abused the rules of the Senate to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on something called the Inflation Reduction Act, which, in true Washington form, does not actually reduce inflation. But that is the name they gave to it. More importantly, this massive bill included a variety of pet projects, from a supersized Internal Revenue Service to handouts for rich folks who want to buy electric vehicles.

Wealthy Americans, the only ones who can afford these expensive cars, can receive up to $7,500 in taxpayer assistance to buy an electric vehicle. So, in effect, you and I and everyone in the country is subsidizing, with our tax dollars, a private, well-to-do person to buy an electric vehicle, most of which costs in the $60 to $70 to $80,000 range and up.

Democrats passed this bill at a time when most people can't afford their basic expenses. That is because of inflation, another product of profligate spending. Working families are struggling to keep up with the cost of everything from gasoline to groceries, to rent and electricity. Our Democratic colleagues responded by forcing every person in America to subsidize wealthy people's purchase of an electric car.

Initial estimates pegged the costs of these EV tax credits, as they are called, at just over $30 billion. That is a lot of money. But private forecasters have recently reevaluated that number based on more precise projections. They said that the actual cost of the electric vehicle credits will be closer to $196 billion--6\1/2\ times higher than advertised.

Again, hard-working families are suffering under inflation. When everything costs more, their purchasing power is diminished. Washington, DC, and our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle said: Well, your life is not quite hard enough; so we are going to make it harder. We are going to force you to subsidize wealthy people's purchase of these cars.

Unfortunately, that is not the end of the story. The administration recently rolled out new rules to ensure--or at least to claim--that, by 2032, two-thirds of new passenger vehicles sold in the United States will be electric.

By 2032, President Biden will be long gone. Probably many Members of the U.S. House and Senate will no longer be in office. Nevertheless, the administration says that, by 2032, we are going to mandate that two-thirds of new passenger vehicles be run on batteries, be electric.

Of course, this announcement was met with applause by those who think that every driver in America should drive an electric vehicle, that somehow this is the price that has to be paid in pursuit of climate change or to combat climate change.

But everybody else in America understands this is an unrealistic mandate because, like I said, with 280 million cars on the road, only about 6 percent max of the new cars sold in America are electric vehicles--only 6 percent of the new cars sold.

But the Biden administration says that, by 2031, two-thirds of the cars have to be electric vehicles. So making the leap from 6 percent to 66 percent--which is two-thirds of the new car sales--in less than 10 years is an impossible task, and it comes with a lot of risks and hurdles.

One of the most obvious ones is cost to consumers. At the end of last year, the average price of a new electric vehicle--this is just the average price--was more than $61,000. That is only a few thousand dollars less than the median household income in my State.

Most families don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on fancy electric cars. As we have seen over the last few years with inflation, people are already struggling to keep up. They are not in the market for a fancy new electric vehicle that costs more than they make in an entire year.

Another big issue has to do with how these vehicles are going to get powered. One of my favorite questions for my friends who are enthusiasts for this mandate and these taxpayer subsidies--one of my favorite questions--is this: Do you actually know where electricity comes from?

No, it is not just that wall socket that you plug an appliance into. Electricity is generated by the same source that produces most of our other energy: natural gas, some nuclear, some coal, some other types of energy--hydroelectric energy, depending upon the location. But all of that energy use, including fossil fuels, is needed to produce affordable energy that then becomes electricity, that you can then plug your vehicle into.

So this pie-in-the-sky idea that we are going to somehow cool the climate by everybody driving an electric vehicle is just--well, it is unattainable, and it is, frankly, ridiculous.

Last year, 60 percent of America's electricity was generated by fossil fuels, including 40 percent by natural gas and nearly 20 percent by coal. Despite the fact that we will need these energy sources to power the electric grid and charge electric vehicles, we know the folks on the left side of the political spectrum have waged a war on fossil fuels. Well, this will turn out about as well as Europe's dependency on Russian oil and gas, on a sole source of energy, which they found out did not turn out well at all once Russia invaded Ukraine and they tried to diversify their energy sources. Putting all of our eggs in one basket with unrealistic goals and mandates to achieve a social outcome is bound to be unsuccessful.

Our colleagues across the aisle have also made these energy sources more expensive by instituting a methane fee and tax hikes on energy producers, which, invariably, get passed on to the consumer; and they are consistently, it seems, trying to make fossil fuels less affordable in order to push our country toward renewables.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not opposed to renewables. We generate more electricity from wind turbines in Texas than any other State in the Nation. One reason our State continues to prosper economically is because we have the most affordable energy costs that come from an all- of-the-above strategy. We don't try to put all of our eggs in one basket--that is bound to be unsuccessful. We say: Well, let's do as much as we can using renewables--solar, wind--but we are also pragmatically clear-eyed about where electricity comes from, and we need all of the above.

So one big important issue that I think was overlooked when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed by strictly Democratic votes in the Senate is that renewables only accounted for 22 percent of America's electricity generation last year--22 percent. It is growing, but it is not nearly sufficient to generate the electricity necessary to charge your electric vehicles.

Either consumers have low-cost, reliable energy from fossil fuels or an all-of-the-above strategy, or else, they are condemned to an expensive and unreliable grid powered only by renewable energy sources. Those are the only options at this point, and I am afraid that is exactly the path that our Democratic colleagues are heading down.

But since COVID-19 hit, we have seen what happens to vulnerable supply chains for the components we need to do all sorts of things. We spent a lot of time and money and focus on advanced semiconductors. That is really important because if we lost access to those advanced semiconductors, it would tank our economy and it would also jeopardize our national security. But the supply chain for electric vehicles is a vulnerable one as well. The feature that differentiates electric vehicles from those with an internal combustion engine is a battery. And, actually, what you can think of is the electric vehicles are like a battery on wheels run by a computer. And--this should really come as no surprise, but you would think this would have been vetted before-- here is where batteries come from.

Last year, China's battery manufacturing capacity accounted for 77 percent of the global total. Its production capacity is greater than that of the rest of the world combined. You can see Poland at 6 percent, the U.S. at 6 percent, and everybody else is at just 11 percent.

China is home to 6 of the world's 10 biggest battery makers and completely dominates the global battery-manufacturing market. Nobody else even comes close. By 2027, it is estimated that its manufacturing capacity is expected to increase nearly sevenfold--sevenfold. In that same timeframe, the United States is expected to see a twelvefold increase, but we are starting at 6 percent. That is not going to get us anywhere near where China is or where they will be by 2027.

China will still command more than two-thirds of the world's battery- manufacturing capacity and the United States will be in second place with a measly 10 percent. Anyone who doesn't recognize and appreciate this issue hasn't been paying attention. Over the years, the Senate has been spending a great deal of time analyzing and addressing supply chain and particularly security gaps. As I had said, the pandemic taught us many lessons--many tough lessons--but one was the importance of a resilient supply chain. And we tried to make sure--we tried to learn from that so those lessons would not be in vain.

I mentioned semiconductors. That may be the best example. The global chip shortage affected everything from personal electronics to cars to defense assets and critical infrastructure.

We came to appreciate the hard way how reliant we had become on other countries for these semiconductors, these integrated circuits. And that made us incredibly vulnerable to another pandemic, to a natural disaster or, heaven forbid, a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

So Congress responded appropriately by creating the CHIPS Program to bolster domestic chip manufacturing and close this massive security gap.

But now our Democratic friends seem content to replace one vulnerability with another. As they continue to push for arbitrary and unrealistic electric vehicle goals, we will find ourselves in a similar situation when it comes to the batteries necessary to run these electric vehicles. To be blunt about it, we will be at China's mercy which, as we all know, is a very dangerous place to be.

Despite the fact that China dominates the supply chain for the critical minerals used to produce batteries, most of those minerals are not actually mined in China. They come from reserves around the world. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, is home to the world's largest cobalt reserve. Indonesia is the leading producer of nickel. And three of the largest lithium reserves are concentrated in South America in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.

Critical minerals are not safe from Chinese influence just because they are mined beyond China's borders, because China has made a huge investment in processing those critical minerals in China. In other words, they are mined in these countries, exported to China for processing, where they control access to the critical minerals that are needed to build batteries, among other things. China has aggressively increased its own processing capacity.

Part of the problem, I might mention, is because it takes so long and requires an arduous, bureaucratic Rubik's Cube in order to get a permit to build things in America. And that is true whether it is from fossil fuels or the transmission lines from green energy that can transmit the electricity generated from wind turbines in Texas or anywhere else. You don't have those problems in China. They also don't have the same concerns we have for the environment.

As we know, China is building more coal-fired power plants than any other country in the world. What happens in China does not stay in China when it comes to those emissions.

So, right now, we have a general sense of the problems that we are confronting, but we are lacking some specifics when it comes to critical minerals, particularly. We don't know what reserves are under the control of foreign adversaries. We aren't guaranteed to receive a heads-up before major deals are made regarding mining rights and processing. Indeed, China has shown itself to be expert at operating surreptitiously under the cover of companies that sound like they come from somewhere else, where actually the People's Republic of China--the Chinese Communist Party--actually has controlling interest in those companies.

So we are not able to identify the many risks of the global supply chain or critical opportunities for new trade partnerships. We need to address the blind spots that are protecting China's dominance in critical minerals and battery production. And we are not going to be able to do it overnight and certainly are not going to be able to meet President Biden's goal of two-thirds of new cars being electric vehicles by 2032. It is just not going to happen unless we are going to go to China and get those batteries.

So a number of us are working to try to solve the problem. I think that is the appropriate response.

I hope this is a topic where we can work together and that we are in bipartisan support, much as we did on the CHIPS Act, where Senator Warner, the senior Senator from Virginia, and I introduced that bill back in June of 2020, and we ended up passing that into law, as I indicated earlier, because both sides of the aisle saw a need to come together and come up with a solution.

We need a solution in this area, too.

Well, our colleagues on the other side have repeatedly prioritized some ideological obsession with all electric vehicles over the practical ramifications. Most Americans can't afford to purchase these pricey vehicles. Given the war on fossil fuels, our electric grid may not be able to sustain them, even if they could. By increasing our reliance on battery-powered vehicles, we are certain to increase our reliance on China. Given the major costs and risks, you have to ask, is this really worth it? Can we afford the risks? Will it actually--can it actually work? Will this have an impact on emissions as our friends across the aisle seem to believe?

The answer is no. China is responsible for nearly one-third of all global emissions. As I said, they build more new coal-fired power plants than any other place on the planet. So China is responsible for nearly one-third of all global emissions, more than 2\1/2\ times the amount emitted by the United States.

When it comes to U.S. emissions, passenger vehicles are only a fraction of the total. In 2021, the entire transportation sector accounted for 28 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. So if every car and every truck on the road was operated by an electric battery and electric vehicle courtesy of China, that would only account for 28 percent of the emissions. So this is not a solution to what our colleagues across the aisle are actually saying they are trying to do.

Transportation is a significant source of emissions, beating out electricity production, industry, and agriculture, but that doesn't mean that personal vehicles are responsible for 28 percent of the emissions, because you have to include cars, SUVs and minivans, and trucks that drive all across America. So regular working families driving their kids to school or to work account for a little over one- half of the transportation emissions. The remainder comes from semitrucks, airplanes, trains, buses, ships, pipelines. In total, personal vehicles account for a little over 16 percent, and the U.S. emissions account for only 12.5 percent of global emissions.

So we are not talking about a solution that our friends across the aisle say they want to accomplish. We are not going to eliminate our dependence on all of the above sources of energy, and we are certainly not going to solve what they perceive as a problem with the climate by forcing hardworking American families to subsidize electric cars for rich people.

My purpose in speaking today is to demonstrate that these goals set out for by the President and which our colleagues have voted for in pursuit of their climate agenda are unrealistic. They are dangerous, and they are shortsighted. We will continue to shine a bright light on the facts as I have tried to do today so the American people can understand exactly what is going on here. This is more a pursuit of an ideological agenda rather than a practical solution to the real problem.

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