A carbon tariff is the right way to confront China on trade

Climate-friendly tariffs would penalize countries that undercut American companies with dirtier production.

Op-ed by Ely Sandler and Daniel Schrag, The Washington Post, June 23, 2025

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are in limbo, struck down by one federal court and temporarily reinstated by another. Congress, with its slim Republican majority, seems unlikely to enact them into law. Beyond the legal or political fights, however, the motivating question behind the tariffs remains: How should America respond when trading partners tilt the scales, whether through unfair subsidies, trade barriers or lax environmental regulation?

Fortunately, there’s an alternative approach in Congress that can build on Trump’s trade agenda more effectively, more durably and, potentially, with a much broader coalition of support: holding trading partners responsible for the pollution that gives them a leg up in manufacturing.

At its core, this is a question about China and a handful of other countries whose advantages are powered, quite literally, by cheap and dirty energy. China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide and the world’s largest exporter. Those facts are not unrelated. Despite an impressive rollout of clean energy, China’s factories still run overwhelmingly on coal. This makes China’s exports far dirtier than goods produced in America.

The answer might therefore lie in a smarter kind of tariff — one that scales based on the carbon dioxide emissions produced during manufacturing. A bill to do just that was recently introduced by two Republican senators; similar proposals have drawn bipartisan support in the past.

Though the United States is often portrayed as lagging on climate, American manufacturers in sectors such as aluminum, cement, steel and fertilizer are significantly cleaner than what we import from abroad. That’s largely due to America’s abundant natural gas, which pollutes far less than coal. This means that in a world where companies have to pay for the carbon dioxide they emit, goods made in America become more competitive.

The Foreign Pollution Fee Act, which is currently going through budget reconciliation, was introduced by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina). It would impose a tariff based on how much carbon dioxide the exporter has emitted. Markets such as Britain and the European Union, which are similar in carbon intensity to the U.S., would be exempt, while heavy polluters such as China and Russia would pay more. Although structured differently, the bill would function like the E.U.’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a climate-focused trade measure that aims to raise revenue and support domestic industry.

In our analysis of the proposed legislation, we highlight three key opportunities that make this bill especially timely in light of the recent tariff rulings.

First, carbon tariffs generate revenue. We estimate that the proposal could raise up to $198 billion over five years, nearly triple what the U.S. collected in tariffs over all of last year. Though this is probably an upper bound, as trade reshuffling could lower the revenue potential, others’ more conservative models still put the figure in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions.

Second, the tariffs would give American industry a competitive edge against exporters to the U.S., especially China. American products are less carbon-intensive than most imports covered by the bill — in some instances, over 90 percent cleaner. According to one analysis, this could lead to a nearly 10 percent increase in U.S. manufacturing for a sector such as cement and more than a 7 percent increase for iron and steel.

Third, the proposed legislation from Graham and Cassidy is not paired with a domestic carbon price — a deliberate choice to make the bill more acceptable to Republican lawmakers and to voters, who have rebelled against carbon taxes in other countries. This might be a politically necessary concession, but it comes with a cost.

Pairing carbon tariffs with a carbon price at home would increase revenue and strengthen the policy’s legal footing under international trade rules, which typically require alignment between domestic and border measures. More important, without a carbon price, America’s emissions advantage might erode as other countries decarbonize and U.S. firms face no comparable incentive. With superior access to capital and technology, American industry is well positioned to outperform dirtier global competitors, but only if policy rewards investment. The carbon price could be phased in gradually, giving U.S. manufacturers time to adapt and invest without undermining energy output today.

There are still trade-offs to consider. Like all tariffs, the proposal would raise the cost of imported goods, risking inflation. Unlike most carbon-related border measures, it is based on the value of imports rather than an explicit carbon price, a design that could provoke pushback from U.S. trading partners. These are valid concerns. But so is the need to protect American industry and lay the groundwork for carbon pricing that rewards cleaner production and lowers emissions. Neither the president nor congressional leaders in either party should pass up such an opportunity.

Ely Sandler is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper professor of geology and a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/23/tariffs-china-trade-carbon-emissions/

Summer evenings are getting warmer nationwide

By Alex Fitzpatrick, Axios, June 17, 2025

Summer evenings are getting warmer across much of the U.S. — especially in Nevada and other parts of the Southwest — amid climate change, a new analysis shows.

Why it matters: Higher overnight temperatures can have health consequences for vulnerable groups, as well as increase demand for air conditioning.

• That, in turn, can strain electrical grids and increase energy demand, fueling a vicious cycle with more greenhouse gas emissions.

Driving the news: Average summer nighttime temperatures increased between 1970 and 2024 in 96% of 241 locations analyzed in a new report from Climate Central, a research and communications group.

• Among cities with an increase, temperatures rose by 3.1°F on average.

Zoom in: Reno, Nevada (+17.7°F), Las Vegas (+10°F), El Paso, Texas (+8.9°F) and Salt Lake City (+8.2°F) saw the biggest increases.

What they're saying: "There's a lot of work ahead of us, and we don't have all the answers," Brian Beffort, sustainability manager for Reno's Washoe County, recently told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

• "I'm focused on trees because they check the most number of boxes: They clean the air. They prevent stormwater. They cool things off ... There's a lot of planning that we need to do. But that's not the only intervention that we need."

Between the lines: Hundreds of U.S. cities are experiencing more frequent warmer-than-average summer nights "with a strong climate change fingerprint," Climate Central says.

That's based on the group's "Climate Shift Index" — a method of measuring climate change's impact on local daily temperatures — and the 1991-2020 climate normals.

The bottom line: It isn't just daytime highs getting warmer in much of the U.S., but evening lows, too.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/17/summer-nights-warmer-climate-change?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Many coastal communities are flooding more than we thought, researchers find

Researchers installed sensors inside stormwater drains and cameras above them in three North Carolina communities. They found a startling amount of flooding.

By Brady Dennis, The Washington Post, June 2, 2025

Fast-rising seas have forced some coastal communities to endure flooding far more frequently than previously thought, and much more often than federal tide gauges would suggest, according to a new findings from researchers in North Carolina.

“I view it as a harbinger of what’s to come,” said Katherine Anarde, an assistant professor of coastal engineering at North Carolina State University and one of the lead authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

To document the true prevalence and duration of flooding, researchers installed sensors inside stormwater drains and cameras above them in three North Carolina communities — Beaufort, Carolina Beach and Sea Level.

What they found was startling.

During a single year, from May 2023 through April 2024, they logged 26 days of flooding in Beaufort, 65 days in Carolina Beach and 128 days in Sea Level. Many of those floods — defined as water getting on a nearby road — happened on sunny days, and very few were associated with large storm events.

The frequency of flooding was “an order of magnitude greater” than the official number of what are known as high-tide flooding days projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which maintains a network of tide gauges along the coastlines.

The reason tide gauges are “poor indicators of flooding,” the authors write, is not any fault with the instruments, which have long measured water levels in the ocean and serve various purposes. Rather, the existing tools often underestimate the true extent of flooding on land because they “do not measure rainfall runoff, groundwater contributions to flooding, or the effects of local drainage infrastructure,” the study found.

Monday’s study offers insights into a reality that a growing number of coastal communities will face, or already are facing: that infrastructure built for another time and another climate is not equipped to handle the higher tides and persistent flooding fueled by rising seas.

The researchers also argue that many places would benefit from more measurement of water on land, where flooding actually occurs, rather than relying primarily on tide-gauge-based estimates that can miss the nuanced factors that influence localized flood frequency and duration.

“If you don’t know where it’s flooding and why it’s flooding, you might create expensive designs for infrastructure that are counterproductive,” Anarde said.

While the study focused on three low-lying communities in North Carolina, its authors say the findings have relevance for many places along the nation’s coastlines, particularly throughout the Southeast.

Roads, sewer systems, stormwater outfalls and drainage ditches in such places were often “designed for sea levels 100 years ago or more,” said Miyuki Hino, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill environmental social scientist and another of the lead authors.

But as seas have risen in recent decades and land in many places has subsided, or sunk, communities throughout the Gulf and Southeast Atlantic coasts have grappled with more persistent flooding. “The problems we are seeing here are extremely likely to be problems we are seeing elsewhere,” Hino said.

In a series of articles last year, The Washington Post documented how the American South has experienced one of the most rapid rates of sea-level rise on Earth since 2010. At more than a dozen tide gauges spanning from Texas to North Carolina, sea levels are at least six inches higher than they were in 2010 — a change similar to what occurred over the previous five decades.

That shift has forced a reckoning in more and more places, from drowning wetlands in Louisiana to waterlogged septic systems in Florida. Some roads are increasingly falling below the highest tides, leaving drivers stranded or delayed. Insurers have raised rates or scaled back coverage in vulnerable places, creating angst about future home values in flood-prone corners of the United States.

Such problems are likely to proliferate over time, as sea levels continue to rise and coastal flooding becomes more frequent and pervasive.

“We are already seeing the start of permanent inundation,” Hino said.

Already, high-tide floods have happened in the Southeast about five times as often as they did in 1990, NOAA oceanographer William Sweet told The Post last year. “We’re seeing flooding in a way that we haven’t seen before,” said Sweet, who leads the agency’s high-tide flooding assessments.

That figure could be modest compared with what lies ahead. High-tide floods in the region are expected to strike 15 times more frequently in 2050 than they did in 2020, Sweet said.

As sea levels continue to rise, the impacts of repeated flooding will continue to worsen, Hino said. And communities need a more granular understanding of their specific vulnerabilities — to plan not only for what lies ahead, but also for what is already happening.

“The physical forces are heading in one direction. What we do [about it] is an open question,” Hino said. “This is not a problem for decades into the future, or generations in the future. This is a problem of today.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/06/02/coastal-flooding-north-carolina/

In Indiana, Putting Up Solar Panels Is Doing God’s Work

A cluster of evangelical groups in the state is pushing for environmental action. Leaders say they’re following the biblical mandate to care for creation.

By Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times, April 21, 2025

The solar panels on the churches were inspired by Scripture.

So were the LED lights throughout the buildings, the electric-vehicle charging stations, the native pollinator gardens and organic food plots, the composting, the focus on consuming less and reusing more.

The evangelical Christians behind these efforts in Indiana say that by taking on this planet-healing work, they are following the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation.

“It’s a quiet movement,” said the Rev. Jeremy Summers, director of church and community engagement for the Evangelical Environmental Network, a nonprofit group with projects nationwide.

In Central Indiana, a patchwork of evangelical churches and universities has been sharing ideas and lessons on how to expand these efforts, broadly known as creation care. Some have partnered on an Earth Day-like celebration they named Indy Creation Fest.

Faith communities of all kinds have been caring for nature throughout history, and many have taken up environmental causes in recent decades. Some religious leaders, like Pope Francis, have made the environment a central focus and have called for action on climate change.

But the efforts in Indiana stand out because they’re springing up in communities that haven’t been as engaged.

Of all major U.S. religious groups, evangelical Protestants are the least likely to hear about climate change during sermons, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, and the least likely to view global climate change as extremely or very serious. Now, networks of evangelicals are looking to shift that.

“If you frame it as environmentalism, or if you frame it as combating global warming, it suddenly gets really politicized,” said the Rev. Nate Pyle, senior pastor at Christ’s Community Church in Fishers, Ind. “When you frame it as stewardship or caring for the creation that God has given us, people are more open.”

In 2021, the creation care committee at his church led an effort to put solar panels on the building. Some members questioned the move, Pastor Pyle said. But they seemed to come around after learning that the church paid for them through grants and private donations and that the panels would save on energy costs, he said.

The next year, Christ’s Community joined forces with Grace Church, a few miles away in Noblesville, and the Evangelical Environmental Network to sponsor the first Indy Creation Fest, a day of education and family-friendly activities.

Visitors could sample vegan cooking, learn about composting and meet rescued dogs, rabbits and a potbellied pig. “Discover what the Bible says about conservation and sustainability and find out how others in your community are caring for Creation as an expression of their faith,” an announcement read.

Concerns sometimes come up. Is creation care a form of nature worship? (Absolutely not, its advocates say.) Aren’t people more important? (Caring for the environment is part of caring for people, they answer.)

At Grace Church, the creation care committee, called Project Eden, has converted about 10 acres behind the church into a meadow of native plants. Members have diverse interests, said Hannah Miller, who volunteers with the committee and also works for the church. Some are passionate about clean energy, while others care deeply for animals, both wild and domestic.

“The common thing that brought them together was seeing creation care as an integral part of the way that they express their love for God and their love for people,” Ms. Miller said.

Some of the most ambitious work has been undertaken by Englewood Christian Church in central Indianapolis, which has built senior housing with solar panels intended to generate at least as much energy as the building uses. The church also has solar panels on its roof and two electric-vehicle charging stations. Members turned an empty lot nearby into a nature play area for preschoolers with vegetables and native plants. Many in the congregation live nearby and share items like lawn mowers and cars.

Universities are engaged, too. Just over an hour’s drive north of Englewood, two Christian schools, Indiana Wesleyan and Taylor, are home to a smattering of faculty members and students who are active in the movement.

Jennifer Noseworthy, a professor of biology at Indiana Wesleyan, in Marion, Ind., is studying how small, native plant gardens bolster native bee populations. In 2022, she helped start an environmental science major that has been growing every year, she said.

“It’s something that we knew students were looking for, especially students looking for a Christian education,” she said.

Students are often introduced to the concept of creation care for the first time at college, and class discussions sometimes center on why the idea isn’t discussed more at church.

One student at Indiana Wesleyan, Becca Boyd, experienced a crisis of faith in middle school when her concerns about climate change were dismissed in her conservative Christian circle.

“One of the things that I feel like I heard a lot was that I needed to trust in God more,” Ms. Boyd recalled, “that I was questioning God by wanting to take action in that way with the environment.”

It made no sense to her, and she quietly decided that she was an atheist, she said. But during her senior year of high school, she began exploring her faith again. Then, in her freshman year of college, Dr. Noseworthy introduced her to the concept of creation care.

“It was an answer for me,” Ms. Boyd said.

Now Ms. Boyd is a college fellow with Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. She holds a weekly Bible study called Creation Care and Faith in Action. In one meeting this month, the group discussed how consumer culture in the United States can be a kind of false idol. She has been working to get space for a new pollinator garden on campus. And she helped start a student Sustainability Club, which is working with its counterpart at nearby Taylor University, a club called Stewards of Creation.

Now, as the academic year draws to a close, she’s focused on what’s to come, including educational programming and a clothing swap to encourage students to buy less.

“We’re not going to find ourselves through having more things or more money,” she said. “It’s through the community that we have, and being able to provide a healthy future, not just for ourselves, like, as an individual, but for those around us and those on a global scale, and the people who aren’t even here yet, you know?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/climate/indiana-evangelicals-creation-care-stewardship.html?searchResultPosition=2

States Sue Over Freeze on Funding for Electric-Vehicle Charging

A lawsuit led by Washington, Colorado and California accuses the Trump administration of unlawfully withholding funds for new charging stations.

By Karen Zraick and Shawn Hubler, The New York Times, May 7, 2025

A coalition of states led by Washington, Colorado and California sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, charging that it was unlawfully withholding billions of dollars allocated by Congress for electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law provided $5 billion to states to build stations around the country. So far, 71 stations have been built, with many more in development, according to the research firm Atlas Public Policy.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, states that federal agencies have unlawfully frozen those funds and halted approvals for new stations, depriving states of critical resources and damaging the growing electric-vehicle industry.

The White House budget proposal released last week said that it was canceling funding for “failed electric-vehicle-charger grant programs.” President Trump had already taken aim at the program in a January executive order, and the Transportation Department followed with a similar memo the next month. But cutting the funding entirely would require approval from Congress, the lawsuit argued.

“The president continues his unconstitutional attempts to withhold funding that Congress appropriated to programs he dislikes,” said Rob Bonta, the California attorney general. “This time he’s illegally stripping away billions of dollars for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, all to line the pockets of his Big Oil friends.”

Nearly two million “zero-emission vehicles” have been sold in California, one-third of the nationwide total and part of a longstanding effort in the famously car-centric state to reduce air pollution. California had been relying on $384 million from the federal program for charging stations, according to Mr. Bonta’s office.

The state has also invested heavily in charging infrastructure from its own general fund and from the proceeds of carbon credits sold to polluters, to the point that public and shared private chargers in California now outnumber nozzles on gas pumps. Across state lines, however, charging is spottier.

The federal program, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI program, started by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had aimed to build charging networks beyond urban areas and states like California as part of its effort to combat climate change by accelerating the nation’s transition to electric vehicles.

California officials noted on Wednesday that one of the biggest beneficiaries of a stalled domestic E.V. program would be China, which has a substantial lead in E.V. manufacturing and sales abroad. The biggest losers would be rural states that had expected the federal dollars and Tesla, the E.V. company whose billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, is a supporter of Mr. Trump. Tesla has the biggest market share of electric vehicles in the United States, although sales were down in the first quarter of 2025.

“When America retreats, China wins,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said, calling the withholding of federal funds “yet another Trump gift to China.”

“Instead of hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, President Trump could actually help Elon — and the nation — by following the law and releasing this bipartisan funding,” Mr. Newsom said.

Joining the complaint were the attorneys general of Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont and the District of Columbia, all of whom are Democrats.

The memo from the Transportation Department to state officials in February said the administration was reviewing the NEVI program and suspending approvals of state plans. The lawsuit asks the court to declare that memo unlawful and to order the administration to release the funds.

A website tracking NEVI funding run by Atlas Public Policy shows that at least $521 million of the money has been awarded, and some $44 million has been spent. Many of the stations already opened are clustered in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the data shows.

Loren McDonald, the chief analyst at Paren, an E.V. analytics company, said the federal government had been a minor player in the E.V. charging space, with most stations built by private companies. Mr. McDonald said it took many states a long time to decide where to build stations and find companies to bid on the contracts, resulting in a lag time in construction. States that already had experience in building charging stations, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, were able to move faster, he said.

Nonetheless, the plaintiffs said, the president’s order has been disruptive.

Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado said in a statement that his state stood to lose tens of millions of dollars in funding after making “significant progress,” in laying the foundation for widespread E.V. adoption. Officials had planned to use the federal support to fill gaps in rural Colorado and underserved communities, he said.

“Congress had the foresight to authorize funding to build this important infrastructure,” Mr. Weiser added, “and it must be restored immediately.”

In Washington State, the lawsuit contends, the president’s order has held up $55 million in approved congressional funding for E.V. charging, stalling 40 proposed projects.

The White House and the Transportation Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/climate/electric-vehicle-charging-funding-states-lawsuit.html?campaign_id=54&emc=edit_clim_20250508&instance_id=154147&nl=climate-forward&regi_id=66704053&segment_id=197571&user_id=97eb24ff9121d1a70f01fac05f86ea1b

Trump is trashing electric vehicles. China is building cars the world wants.

China dominates global EV sales, while U.S. consumers risk getting stuck on an island of outdated technology.

By Evan Halper, The Washington Post, April 25, 2025

Michael Bickford was excited to get behind the wheel of a Ford F-150 Lightning, but after experiencing the dismal state of the U.S. charging network on a recent road trip, the Portland, Maine, retiree reconsidered.

“I had planned to go fully electric, but I gave up on that when the realities of how difficult that would be here set in,” said Bickford, who is sticking with his hybrid. After pulling his name off the list for the plug-in pickup, he’s holding out for the day the United States catches up to China. He’s in for a long wait.

China is leapfrogging the United States with the availability of more advanced, cheaper electric vehicles, while President Donald Trump is cutting subsidies and making other moves that could leave the U.S. behind. The president’s antipathy toward plug-ins, combined with the U.S. domestic auto industry’s slow rollout of new clean-energy vehicles, is frustrating U.S. motorists who hunger for clean transportation.

“You read about the cars and charging systems they are making in China and think to yourself, ‘Geez, why don’t we have that here?’” Bickford said.

Trump has declared that the Biden administration’s support for electric cars was a Marxist “hoax” that hurt U.S. autoworkers. He is freezing billions of dollars of spending on electric vehicle infrastructure, ripping out charging stations in government buildings, and reversing regulations that incentivize automakers to focus on plug-in innovation. Subsidies for factories that make batteries and other parts have been blocked, triggering a wave of canceled projects. Tax breaks of $7,500 for purchasing plug-ins are targeted for elimination, although Congress will be required to act on the president’s request.

Amid the president’s trade war, meanwhile, Chinese electric cars are unlikely to roll into the United States anytime soon.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, an oil executive before his nomination, said in a speech last month that the administration’s plan is “to reverse the destructive mandates, forcing everyone to buy EVs that have been wreaking havoc on our auto industry and forcing higher prices and reduced choices on consumers.”

He and Trump argue the policy reversals will usher in a renaissance for U.S. automakers, now free to focus on the gas cars that still generate the bulk of their profits.

But the policy will also ensure the U.S. remains behind in the global EV race. Of the more than 17 million EVs sold in 2024 around the world, according to the China Passenger Car Association and research firm Rho Motion, 76 percent of those cars were made by Chinese companies.

The same U.S. auto companies that for years complained vocally about aggressive government actions aimed at speeding the transition to EVs now worry damage from federal abandonment of the transition will be long-lasting.

“We are all going to EVs globally. It is just a question of when,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a former chief global economist at Ford. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the industry group representing all the major U.S. vehicle manufacturers, urged Trump in a November letter to preserve the tax breaks for EV buyers and emissions rules that push automakers to innovate and sell electric models. Plug-in technology is advancing so rapidly, with longer battery ranges and expanding charging networks, that analysts expect consumer preference for the cars to eventually overtake that of gas vehicles.

It all puts an industry crucial to the U.S. economy in a precarious place, with analysts warning there is only so long U.S. auto giants can rely on tariffs to wall consumers off from Chinese offerings. Europe has already bent to consumer demand, with drivers eagerly buying up reliable EVs with sticker prices as low as $20,000 from red-hot Chinese EV makers like BYD, short for “Build Your Dreams.” Last month, BYD announced it had fulfilled a dream of many motorists by unveiling electric cars that could be fully charged in five minutes.

The starting price of the new fast-charging BYD cars sold in China is under $28,600, more than 10 percent cheaper than a Tesla Model 3 there.

“If those products were to come to the U.S., the auto industry here would be in deep trouble,” said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a market research firm that advises automakers. They could lure masses of motorists who right now have no interest in going electric, he said.

Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now account for 19 percent of all cars sold worldwide, up from just 4 percent five years ago. Chinese models account for 17 of the 20 top-selling plug-ins globally, according to CleanTechnica. The only U.S. company that ranks on that list is Tesla, and it is fast losing market share. Tesla vehicle deliveries plunged 13 percent the first quarter this year.

In Brazil, where Ford has stopped making cars altogether, its former factory is now owned by BYD, which dominates the country’s fledgling but fast-growing EV market. Sales of EVs in Brazil grew 85 percent in 2024. A local lawmaker wants to change the name of the street where the factory sits from Henry Ford Avenue to BYD Avenue. BYD and other Chinese EV companies are steadily growing their market share in Europe, with BYD building a plant in Hungary and other Chinese brands eyeing factories in Poland and Spain.

“We’re on an island, vulnerable and not playing offense anymore,” Michael Dunne, a prominent auto industry consultant, said at a recent Washington gathering of energy and Western auto officials hosted by SAFE, a nonprofit focused on U.S. energy security. “We cannot remain on this island here in North America and just hope for the best.”

Detroit executives, criticized for years for focusing on gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, are now trying to catch up while navigating the shifting winds from Washington.

Soon after the president signed an order directing a pivot away from EVs, Ford CEO Jim Farley was warning shareholders that the company needs to urgently lean in on electric. He highlighted in a call how motorists around the world are rapidly shifting to EVs and markets where American vehicles were long king are now being “dominated by the Chinese.”

Farley himself had a Xiaomi electric car delivered from Shanghai to Chicago and drove it for months, telling a podcaster in October how he marvels at this vehicle that was designed and manufactured by a cellphone company.

He said Ford is retooling its strategy around EVs with a moonshot-like effort to replicate the Chinese model of innovating cheap, high-tech vehicles in a division walled off from the company’s legacy production lines.

General Motors says it is racing to develop a breakthrough in battery technology that would reposition it as a major player in the EV race.

Both Ford and GM did not answer detailed questions from The Washington Post. But the companies have consistently said they need to see more U.S. consumer EV demand to expand their offerings. And consumers here often won’t consider them because the U.S. charging network is so bad.

Federal investment in U.S. charging infrastructure has been frozen altogether by Trump after the Biden administration was able to deliver only a couple hundred of the half-million chargers it promised by 2030. Tens of thousands of planned chargers may never get installed. China already has nearly 20 public chargers for every one in the United States, and Europe has four times as many chargers as the U.S.

Hughes-Cromwick, now a fellow at the center-left think tank Third Way, said her own driving experience underscores what a heavy lift it will be to catch up to China. She said navigating her Ford Mach-E plug-in from Michigan to New Jersey recently was a white-knuckle experience. She repeatedly encountered broken chargers and had to call for help when the plug got stuck in her car at one stop.

At a Walmart in Ohio, she was driving circles around the parking lot looking for the charging station her car’s software identified as available, only to learn from a greeter in the store that it had been removed. Hughes-Cromwick had just 20 miles of range left on her battery. She barely made it to a functioning station.

“It was unbelievable how bad it was,” she said. “It was a rough start to the trip.”

Hughes-Cromwick said the auto manufacturers can fix the charger shortage by following the lead of Tesla, which built its own charging network to conform with the cars it makes. That’s the model used in China, where the car companies operate like government-backed start-ups. But that’s expensive. Tesla lost money for 18 years before making a profit. Sustaining such losses is more difficult for publicly traded, legacy automakers, who face pressure from shareholders to grow quarterly profits.

Meanwhile, Trump’s freeze on subsidies is causing companies to abandon plans to build factories making EV components in the U.S. after the administration froze subsidies. Scrapped projects include billion-dollar battery factories in Georgia and Arizona.

Even some fans of the president’s industrial policies are unnerved.

“It is not good that they have taken some of these steps” to undermine EV sales and innovation, said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “Car companies are going to have to tell this administration, ‘You will be faced with half-built factories here if you don’t stop this war on clean energy vehicles.’ They will hopefully start to listen. I don’t think this administration wants its legacy to be a landscape where they have vacant plants in places like Tennessee with weeds growing in the parking lot.”

The U.S. is beset with finger-pointing. Industry executives and GOP lawmakers say mandates from Democratic administrations and states like California forced automakers to make ill-timed investments, before consumer demand and chargers were in place.

“They caused these car companies to lose tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). “They did everything wrong.”

As the industry lobbied against a phaseout of the internal combustion engine, China’s government was seeding dozens of EV companies with tens of billions of dollars.

“These incredibly cheap, high-quality EVs from China are impossible to match if you don’t have the U.S. government helping manufacturers make this transition,” said Ann Carlson, former chief counsel for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “The shortsightedness of the industry in not seeing the trend would be toward electrification has put them in a precarious position. Now, Trump blocking every effort to assist that transition leaves us in a very dicey place.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/25/auto-evs-trump-china-electric/