Detroit – Michigan is accelerating an expensive, green economic transition modeled after California. As the state loses population, auto jobs exit, and utility rates climb, however, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer says the state has an advantage over its coastal peer: It won’t be under water from climate change.
“In the decades ahead, the effects of climate change will accelerate, and Michigan will be a climate refuge,” she said in laying out her business plan fresh off COVID policies that destroyed 94,500 jobs (the nation’s seventh worst).
The Great Lakes state, she continued, will be a haven for “climagrant” refugees as they flee submerged western and eastern seaboards.
Whitmer laid out her plan at the Mackinac Policy Conference on Mackinac Island last year – located in the straits that separate Lake Michigan from Lake Huron – where cars are banned and the primary transportation is horse and buggy. It is 270 miles – and a political chasm – from southeast Michigan’s auto-dependent, population center which is already feeling the effects of the Democratic Party’s climate agenda.
The Policy Conference’s Democratic and corporate elite set a blueprint for a zero-carbon, government-run economy with a focus on surviving in a post-Apocalyptic world allegedly destroyed by. . . the state’s bread-and-butter gas-powered automobiles. With Democrats in charge of every political institution– governor’s mansion, House, Senate, and Supreme Court – state leadership has embraced the Democratic Party’s War on Carbon.
Under California and US government regulation, the auto industry’s diverse drivetrain options are being socialized into one: battery-power. Popular gas models have already been eliminated – Chevy Camaro, Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger, Ford Edge, Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator diesel models, and counting – as companies face billions in fines if they don’t conform with regulatory edicts.
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The auto industry has become government’s marionette, dancing for billions in subsidies to pay for EVs that are sitting on dealer lots for over 100 days. Ford is converting its best-selling pickup truck, the F-150, to electric – introducing a Lightning EV model that debuted last year to media and political applause and projected sales of 150,000 a year.
It sold just 24,000 units as customers pondered a $57,000-$100,00 pickup that can’t tow a boat more than 100 miles. Production has been cut from three shifts to one.
The Detroit-based United Auto Workers, which have reflexively embraced the Party’s EV edicts, is suddenly urging elites to pause. According to the UAW’s own research director, Jennifer Kelly: “engine and transmissions jobs will be eliminated when we make a transition to electric vehicles. Electric, to me, is where the real risk is to our membership.”
The American First Policy Institute study estimated 117,00 job losses due to the forced EV transition with Michigan losing more than any other state (25,000). In Europe, where gas car bans are even more aggressive than in the US, Germany has hemorrhaged auto supplier jobs – from 310,000 in 2019 to 270,000 today as automakers have shifted to EVs and production has plunged.
“The move to EVs will require fewer jobs because there are fewer moving parts. It continues the automotive trend towards productivity, it’s not the way for the state to grow jobs,” said economist James Hohman, Director of Fiscal Policy for the Michigan-based Mackinac Center free market think tank. Since 2000, auto employment in Michigan has dropped from 315,000 to 166,850.
At a Metro Detroit campaign rally ahead of the February Michigan Presidential Primary, GOP candidate Donald Trump welcomed retired Ford autoworker Brian Pannebecker, founder of Autoworkers for Trump, on stage at a Metro Detroit rally – a symbol of rank-and-file workers disgruntled with UAW leadership’s embrace of the Democratic Party agenda.
EVs would also be increasingly expensive to charge as Whitmer & co. have committed to eliminating the fossil-fuel generation by 2040, including southeast Michigan’s largest coal-fired plant which will be decommissioned in 2032. The state’s residential utility costs have already shot up to 21 cents per kW – not far off California’s notoriously-high 25 cents.
“All this is being driven by electrification,” said Detroiter and Camaro owner James Martin, 62, who is also an auto industry consultant.
Whitmer’s climagrant speech was cheered by a Mackinac Policy Conference audience of corporate, government, Democratic Party, and media elites. Whitmer’s confidence is understandable – despite draconian COVID policies, she won re-election in a landslide in 2022, Democratic legislative majorities riding her coattails.
Organized by the Detroit Chamber of Commerce at the tony Grand Hotel, the conference is miles from Detroit’s gutted, inner-city neighborhoods that have struggled under decades of Democratic policies that have fueled family breakdown, the nation’s fifth-highest crime rate, and some of the country’s worst public schools. None of Detroit’s problems were on the Mackinac agenda. Instead, panels focused on climate change, equity, and electric cars.
Democratic elites once showered Detroit with billions from War on Poverty programs – now they shower rich suburbanites with $7,500 tax breaks to buy EVs.
The effects of Democrats’ War on Carbon are already opening state exits as Ford and GM (fueled by Inflation Reduction Act subsidies) have located battery plants in southern states with cheaper energy costs.
Whitmer allies tout – not the state’s economic climate – but its weather.
"Our relative stable weather is going to be a net benefit,” said Quentin Messer Jr., CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp., in an interview with The Detroit News. “There will be parts of the Gulf South that will be uninhabitable, and the insurance rates for home insurance will be exorbitant. And people are going to begin to look to migrate back to the Great Lakes."
Whitmer recruited Messer to the Chamber from New Orleans where he oversaw Hurricane Katrina cleanup in 2005. “Trust and believe," Messer said, "that is something that's going to happen over the next 10-15 years."
Payne is auto columnist for The Detroit News. Find him at hpayne@detroitnews.com or Twitter @HenryEPayne
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