From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By David Blackmon

The future direction of federal energy policy related to the transportation sector is a key question that will be determined in one way or another by the outcome of the presidential election. What remains unclear is the extent of change that a Trump presidency would bring.

Given that Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is a major supporter of former President Donald Trump, it seems unlikely a Trump White House would move to try to end the EV subsidies and tax breaks included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those provisions, of course, constitute the “carrot” end of the Biden-Harris carrot-and-stick suite of policies designed to promote the expansion of EVs in the U.S. market.

The “stick” side of that approach comes in the form of stricter tailpipe emissions rules and higher fleet auto-mileage requirements imposed on domestic carmakers. While a Harris administration would likely seek to impose even more federal pressure through such command-and-control regulatory measures, a Trump administration would likely be more inclined to ease them.

But doing that is difficult and time-consuming and much would depend on the political will of those Trump appoints to lead the relevant agencies and departments.

Those and other coercive EV-related policies imposed during the Biden-Harris years have been designed to move the U.S. auto industry directionally to meet the administration’s stated goal of having EVs make up a third of the U.S. light duty fleet by 2030. The suite of policies does not constitute a hard mandate per se but is designed to produce a similar pre-conceived outcome.

It is the sort of heavy-handed federal effort to control markets that Trump has spoken out against throughout his first term in office and his pursuit of a second term.

A new report released this week by big energy data and analytics firm Enverus seems likely to influence prospective Trump officials to take a more favorable view of the potential for EVs to grow as a part of the domestic transportation fleet. Perhaps the most surprising bit of news in the study, conducted by Enverus subsidiary Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), is a projection that EVs are poised to be lower-priced than their equivalent gas-powered models as soon as next year, due to falling battery costs.

“Battery costs have fallen rapidly, with 2024 cell costs dipping below $100/kWh. We predict from [2025] forward EVs will be more affordable than their traditional, internal combustible engine counterparts,” Carson Kearl, analyst at EIR, says in the release. Kearl further says that EIR expects the number of EVs on the road in the US to “exceed 40 million (20%) by 2035 and 80 million (40%) by 2040.”

The falling battery costs have been driven by a collapse in lithium prices. Somewhat ironically, that price collapse has in turn been driven by the failure of EV expansion to meet the unrealistic goal-setting mainly by western governments, including the United States. Those same cause-and-effect dynamics would most likely mean that prices for lithium, batteries and EVs would rise again if the rapid market penetration projected by EIR were to come to fruition.

In the U.S. market, the one and only certainty of all of this is that something is going to have to change, and soon. On Monday, Ford Motor Company reported it lost another $1.2 billion in its Ford Model e EV division in the 3^rd quarter, bringing its accumulated loss for the first 9 months of 2024 to $3.7 billion.

Energy analyst and writer Robert Bryce points out in his Substack newsletter that that Model e loss is equivalent to the $3.7 billion profit Ford has reported this year in its Ford Blue division, which makes the company’s light duty internal combustion cars and trucks.

While Tesla is doing fine, with recovering profits and a rising stock price amid the successful launch of its CyberTruck and other new products, other pure-play EV makers in the United States are struggling to survive. Ford’s integrated peers GM and Stellantis have also struggled with the transition to more EV model-heavy fleets.

None of this is sustainable, and a recalibration of policy is in order. Next Tuesday’s election will determine which path the redirection of policy takes.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Adam Pack

Former President Donald Trump and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent vow to tackle public health issues together could signal a major shift in Republican priorities if the Trump campaign prevails on Election Day.

Trump has called for the creation of an independent commission with Kennedy’s input and pledged to address various Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) issues the former independent candidate has brought to the forefront, including improving the public’s intake of nutritious foods and addressing the rising trend of obesity in adults. These concerns, in addition to other MAHA priorities that have not historically found much support in the GOP such as calling for more stringent environmental regulations, indicate that a potential Trump administration may take a different approach on health, agricultural and environmental issues than during his first term in office.

Campaign officials, GOP lawmakers and health experts previewed a diverse set of MAHA priorities in interviews with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Tackling the rising chronic disease rate that impacts roughly 60% of American adults is a shared point of concern.

“It’s finally turning the page and saying, ‘We want a health system, not a disease system,’” Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the DCNF. “For 50 years we built a disease system.”

“When we send President Trump back to the White House, he will work alongside passionate voices like RFK Jr. to Make America Healthy Again by providing families with safe food and ending the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our children,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, told the DCNF. “President Trump will also establish a special Presidential Commission of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by Big Pharma and will charge them with investigating what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic illnesses.”

Republicans and former Trump health officials are enthusiastic that marshaling the federal government in response to the country’s myriad health crises could turn the corner on an era where Americans are facing poorer health outcomes and declining life expectancy.

Redfield endorsed the idea of an independent chronic disease commission and told the DCNF that the federal government “must get more serious in preventing chronic disease” to turn the corner on an era where Americans are facing poorer health outcomes and declining life expectancy.

“It’s much more important to get real time, continuous, day-to-day monitoring of your chronic illness, not just the way the system works now where you check in every six months and someone tells you how you’re doing,” Redfield added. “No, you’ve got to check in every day.”

According to Redfield, a second Trump administration could cut the more than $4 trillion Americans  spend on healthcare every year by half if federal agencies take an “all-of-government” approach to targeting substance use disorder, obesity and ultra-processed foods in addition to improving mental health services.

“These are, in my view, low-hanging fruit,” Redfield told the DCNF. “That alone would improve the American health system substantially.”

Texas Agriculture commissioner Sid Miller, who is helping vet candidates to serve in a second Trump administration, recounted running into a swarm of British schoolchildren while on a recent trade mission to the United Kingdom as providing further confirmation that a second Trump term must take action on obesity and processed foods, in an interview with the DCNF.

“90s kids and there wasn’t one fat kid in the bunch,” Miller, who has also called for bringing back the presidential fitness test program retired by the Obama administration in 2012, told the DCNF. “That kind of inspired me and made me think we’re not doing something right.”

To improve health outcomes for the more than 40% of Americans that are obese, Miller told the DCNF that a second Trump administration should consider ending Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for processed foods.

“Why are we paying for soda drinks and cookies and junk food with SNAP benefits?” Miller told the DCNF. “That needs to stop.”

Miller also pointed to his Texas Fresh Farm program that provides fresh and local products to more than 5 million Texas school members as a program that should be implemented nationwide to improve a portion of the public’s intake of nutritious foods.

Republican lawmakers have also been supportive of a second Trump administration prioritizing nutrition as part of the MAHA agenda.

“As a physician, I can absolutely say that good nutrition leads to better patient outcomes 100 percent of the time. Healthy food is medicine and is the cure for many chronic diseases and curbing health care spending in the United States,” Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas told the DCNF in a statement. “American farmers set the gold standard for nutritious food, and the MAHA agenda will work with farmers and ranchers to continue producing the safest and most wholesome food at affordable prices for our country and the world.”

Implementing MAHA priorities will likely require the empowerment of federal government agencies whose budgets and enforcement powers Republican lawmakers could be inclined to shrink. Taking action on chronic disease and obesity will also necessitate buy-in from members of the public and lawmakers that have lost trust in institutions’ abilities to tell the truth and manage crises without infringing on a person’s individual autonomy.

“Our failed response to the pandemic opened the eyes of millions to the capture and corruption of federal agencies by the corporate interests who are supposed to be regulated by them,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told the DCNF. “As a result, the public’s interest is not being well-served or properly protected.”

“Getting public health officials in the next administration that really spend a lot of energy on trying to reestablish public trust is going to be fundamental to the success of the efforts of Making America Healthy Again,” Redfield told the DCNF. “The vaccine mandates were a big mistake. Closing down our economy—a big mistake. Shutting down our schools—a big mistake. So, there was a huge loss of credibility and trust that has to be rebuilt.”

Redfield is still a strong believer in vaccines, dubbing them as “the most important gift to modern medicine,” but said that vaccine mandates are a self-defeating approach and that debate about a vaccine’s safety and efficacy should be encouraged not denounced.

“I’ve always said that Bobby Kennedy is not anti-vax. Bobby Kennedy just wanted honest transparency and debate about vaccines,” Redfield told the DCNF. “We should foster discussion and debate, and if someone has a question about looking at data to determine a vaccine’s safety that shouldn’t be listed as anti-vax. That should be listed as wanting an honest, open discussion about what is the data?”

“As we secure our borders and rebuild our economy, we are also going to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said at a campaign event with Kennedy in Duluth, Georgia, on Wednesday. “We have more chronic health problems than any nation, more childhood diseases than we did just a generation ago. Millions of Americans are realizing that something is wrong. By getting this fixed not only will we have healthier families, we will save trillions and trillions of dollars and bring down the cost of healthcare.”

“We have a thousand chemicals in our food that are illegal in Europe, but the problem is not from those chemicals. The big problem is corruption in our federal agencies. These agencies are now owned by big Pharma by ‘Big Food’ and Big Agriculture,” Kennedy told the crowd at the same event. “Don’t you want a president that’s going to get the chemicals out of our food? And don’t you want a president that’s going to get the corruption out of Washington, D.C.? And don’t we deserve a president of the United States that’s going to Make America Healthy Again?”

Redfield also told the DCNF that he’s willing to serve in a second Trump administration.

“I’m in the final turn,” Redfield told the DCNF. “I’d obviously work in any way I can to help the President and Bobby Kennedy and our nation move toward health.”

Kennedy did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.