Failure Factories

Argonne, LG Chem, and General Motors are all part of what William Yeatman, an energy policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, describes as a “vertically integrated subsidy.”

Yeatman said the Obama administration “is trying to create an industry [electric vehicles] out of whole cloth, and it finds the only way it can do that is to subsidize every link in the supply chain,” from research and development to battery production to vehicle manufacturing to consumer purchases.

The Volt is “already failing by its own standards,” Yeatman said, noting the president pledged to get 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, fueling critics of the president’s new green energy subsidy plan who say his decision to hold an unveiling event at the Argonne lab actually reinforces critiques of the policy.