Senator Manchin (D-WV) is opposed to government subsidies for building electric charging stations for EVs, because …
“I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles,” Manchin said at the conference. “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas.” He added he doesn’t want to wait in line “for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain.”
“I’ve read history, and I remember Henry Ford inventing the Model-T,” Manchin also said, “but I sure as hell don’t remember the U.S. government building filling stations — the market did that.” [WaPo]
Skipping both obvious and nuanced arguments, such as the observation that the market is neither prescient nor wise, let’s just go to what the writer, Gary Sargent, forgot, and that’s the billions in subsidies provided to the fossil fuel industries over the decades. By enabling the extraction and refinement activities, along with applications, it’s not hard to deduce:
That’s what built the filling stations.
Manchin’s exercising a deeply dishonest argument.
