All Biden’s Green Job Losers

Climate industrial policy is costing 1,350 workers their jobs at a Stellantis plant in Illinois.

President Biden sold the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a giant climate jobs program, but then how does he explain what happened Friday at the StellantisJeep Cherokee plant in Belvidere, Illinois? Some 1,350 workers are losing their jobs so the auto maker can finance its government-mandated and subsidized electric-vehicle expansion.

Europe and several U.S. states have announced plans to ban the sale of new internal-combustion engine vehicles by 2035. Stellantis spent $2.4 billion to buy regulatory credits from Tesla between 2019 and 2021 to comply with green mandates. The Biden fuel economy mandates could force it to spend more unless it ramps up EV production.

Liberals pretend that the transition to EVs won’t come at a cost to workers or businesses. But taxpayers won’t foot the entire bill, which could cost hundreds of billions of dollars industrywide. Workers at Stellantis’s Cherokee plant are the collateral damage of this government-forced reallocation of capital. We’re waiting for Sens. Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders to plead for the workers here.

The United Auto Workers is denouncing Stellantis for laying off workers. “Not allocating new product to plants like Belvidere is unacceptable,” UAW President Ray Curry said. What did he expect? The union backed stricter fuel economy mandates and the IRA subsidies, even though its own studies showed the shift to EVs could cost 35,000 jobs.

Technological change disrupts markets and leads to some job gains and losses. But the problem here is that government is overriding market forces and picking the winners and losers.

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