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 reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he wins a second term Israel’s war in Gaza needs to be finished by the time he takes office in January, The Times of Israel (TOI) reported.

Israel went to war with Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing conflict has left the terrorist group crippled and swaths of the Gaza enclave in ruins. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Israel’s efforts to wipe out Hamas, but has expressed that he wants the war to end in short order, telling Netanyahu in July that it needs to be over by the start of 2025, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told TOI.

The message was relayed to Netanyahu during the prime minister’s visit to Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, the sources told TOI. While Netanyahu’s trip to Mar-a-Lago was widely reported on at the time, this is the first occasion it has been reported that Trump said this during the visit.

Trump didn’t go into specifics with Netanyahu about his request, so it’s possible he would support “residual” Israeli military activity in Gaza, a former U.S. official told TOI. Trump also wants Israel to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza — some of which are American citizens — before he takes office in January.

Relations between Trump and Netanyahu were icy after Trump lost the 2020 election. Netanyahu congratulated President Joe Biden following that election in a video message, angering Trump. Trump also felt at the time Netanyahu wasn’t serious about resolving tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

But the two have seemingly mended relations this year. They have spoken on several occasions since Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago in July. Netanyahu has said that Trump had called him two days in a row recently.

However, Trump has said on multiple occasions that Israel’s war in Gaza needs to end quickly because it has devasted the enclave and the Palestinian population living there, raising concerns among Israeli officials, two Israeli officials told TOI earlier this month. While Israel’s military operations in Gaza have largely ended, the government doesn’t yet seem comfortable with withdrawing entirely — especially given concerns that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, widely seen as a corrupt governing body, will fill the power vacuum.

Despite Trump’s wishes, there are some hardliners in Netanyahu’s orbit who have threatened to oust the prime minister from power if he ends the war.

“A fight with Trump is something he hasn’t really had to deal with, and I think it’s something he’d want to avoid, but [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir may not let him,” a Knesset member told TOI.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.