WSJ What’s News - EVs Become a Campaign Issue in the U.S. Presidential Election

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

P.M. Edition for Sept. 27. Wall Street Journal White House reporter Ken Thomas on why electric vehicles are becoming a big issue in the presidential election. And Israel targets Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with a massive airstrike in Beirut. Plus, scaling up is proving tough for many clean energy startups. The Journal’s Amrith Ramkumar explains one company’s growing pains. Tracie Hunte hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Looking for a collaborator for your career? A strong ally to support your next level success? You will find it at York University School of Continuing Studies, where we offer career programs purpose-built for you. Visit continue.yorku.ca Israel targets the leader of Hezbollah with a massive airstrike in Beirut. And scaling up is proving to be the Achilles heel for many clean energy startups. It's the classic conundrum of clean energy companies that are trying to build hard infrastructure at large scales.

It just takes time and it's expensive. Plus why electric vehicles are becoming a big issue in the presidential election. It's Friday, September 27th. I'm Tracy Hunt for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. Let's start with developments in the Middle East. Israel targeted Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with a massive airstrike on Beirut's southern

suburbs today. People briefed on the attacks, said Israel flattened part of a neighborhood in an attempt to kill the cleric, who has led the group for three decades and built it into a fearsome foe. It wasn't immediately clear whether Nasrallah had been killed. The explosions pulverized several buildings under which Israel's military said Hezbollah's main headquarters was hidden. A municipal official in Beirut said he expected a large number of casualties given the scale

of the attack. The strike came shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The UN chamber was largely empty as many diplomats walked out when Netanyahu was announced as the next speaker. The Israeli Prime Minister said his country will not quote, except a terror army perched on our northern border able to perpetrate another October 7th-style massacre. His comment came amid U.S.-led efforts to seek a diplomatic solution before all-out war breaks out. New York City Mayor Eric Adams pleaded not guilty today to federal corruption charges.

He'll be facing five felony counts while simultaneously fighting to stay in office. The judge ordered Adams to not discuss the facts of the case with witnesses and people mentioned in the indictment. He was released without bail. Adams is the first New York City mayor in modern history to be indicted while in office. The cooling demand for electric vehicles among consumers is becoming an issue in the presidential election as Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump try to appeal to voters.

The competing pitches to members of the United Auto Workers, their retirees, and communities throughout Michigan are at the forefront of Trump and Harris' fight for the state's 15 electoral votes. Joining us now is Wall Street Journal White House reporter Ken Thomas. Ken, how are the two candidates approaching the EV question? Whenever former President Trump is in Michigan, he bashes these so-called EV mandates, which he argues forces the auto industry to build electric vehicles to meet tough emission standards that have been pushed by the Biden administration. Trump has been critical of EVs

and has claimed that they're just not vehicles that most people wanna buy. Harris on the other hand has largely avoided the issue. When she has made appearances in Michigan, she has talked more broadly about her support and commitment to the auto industry, the work that the Biden administration has done to support manufacturing jobs, and this role that she played in casting the tie-breaking vote for the inflation reduction act And so she has positioned herself as someone who is a supporter of the auto industry She has the endorsement of the United Auto Workers

But she has largely avoided the specifics on this issue of EVs and EPA regulations How is it that EVs have become a campaign issue? That's become an issue in this campaign because when Vice President Harris was first running for the presidency in 2019, she called for these tough emission standards that would have required automakers to build electric vehicles in large numbers. She has since backed away from that pledge and supports the approach the Biden administration has taken, which is to provide more flexibility to the industry. Ken Thomas is a White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, as Trump and Harris tried to woo voters with their economic proposals, we wanted to see how these proposals are received by voters and by economists. So we polled 750 registered voters about Trump's and Harris's economic plans. And then we asked the University of Chicago's Clark Center to put those same questions to a panel of 39 top academic economists. Our economics reporter Paul Keran says, the exercise showed that what might delight voters may appall economists. The biggest disagreements between economists and voters were on mainly two policies. Trump's proposal to eliminate taxes on tips for service workers, which Vice President

Harris has also adopted, and Trump's proposal to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, even if it increases the national debt. Pretty strong majorities of voters liked both of those policies, and the vast, vast majority of economists disliked those policies. The policy proposal that economists sort of hate the most with 100% of economists strongly opposed was Trump's proposal to impose a tariff of up to 20% on all imported goods. So that was another big area of disagreement because the tariff policy among voters kind of breaks down along party lines with most Democrats disliking it and most Republicans liking it and on the whole

47% of voters like the tariff policy and 40% dislike it. Americans are having fewer babies and it's become a campaign issue. What questions do you have about what our falling birth rate means for the way we live, how our economy grows, and for America standing in the world? Send a voice memo to wnpod at wsj.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. We might use it on the show. Coming up, why clean energy startups stumble when they try to go big. That's after the break.

At Dynamic Funds, we believe that investment performance matters. As legitimately active managers, we stand behind our performance each and every day, continually striving to deliver index-beating performance for our investors. Dynamic Funds, invest with advice. Visit dynamic.ca slash advice to learn more. We're exclusively reporting that Monolith, a clean energy startup with big Wall Street backers and a deal for a $1 billion government loan, is running short on cash and facing project delays, potentially jeopardizing its long-promised expansion.

Joining us now to discuss some of the challenges Monolith is facing is a journal's Amrit Ramkumar. Amrit, what went wrong with Monolith? Nothing actually went wrong. It's just happening a bit slower than they told people it would happen. So Monolith is gradually scaling up this pretty complicated process for making carbon black, a material that goes into tires and paints and other products, and ammonia, which is used to make fertilizer. And it can also be used as a clean fuel that doesn't produce many emissions. But they put out some aggressive timelines to investors and other stakeholders, and they announced this $1 billion government loan commitment from this energy department program

nearly three years ago. So naturally, some people are asking what's taking so long, and it's the classic conundrum of clean energy companies that are trying to build hard infrastructure at large scales. It just takes time and it's expensive. Is this typical of the issues clean energy startups are facing as they try to scale up? Monolith is emblematic of a generation of clean energy companies that are at this very difficult pain point. A very highly valued startup called Northvolt in Europe that's making batteries for electric

cars and energy storage. They just laid off 1,600 workers and they're pausing a big factory expansion that was going to be funded by many big banks and they have funding from the European Union. So a lot of startups are hitting this point where it's very hard to become profitable and start generating cash where your factory is basically covering its costs with revenue coming in. And the loan programs office at the DOE is designed to help them survive and give them government funding for these critical clean energy projects.

The problem is the DOE process just takes a really long time. And a big unknown is what happens in the election could impact whether they get this DOE loan of over a billion dollars potentially. Amrit Ramkumar is the Wall Street Journal's climate finance reporter. Inflation keeps slowing and the Dow keeps climbing. The blue chips index rose 0.3 percent or 138 points. After the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge, the personal consumption expenditure's price index, showed that inflation rose 2.2% in August from a year earlier.

That's below economists' expectations. But the S&P 500 tipped 0.1% lower, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq faded downward by 0.4%. All three indexes notched weekly gains. And finally, sending a direct message to a colleague to vent about your boss on workplace chat spaces like Slack or Google's GChat might seem private, but it isn't. Your chat logs could be reviewed by IT admins, human resources representatives, potentially even your managers. Our Your Money Briefing podcast spoke with WSJ personal technology editor, Shara Tipkin, on how your company may be holding on to your messages.

Generally with these big companies, it's not like your boss can just get a running feed of your direct messages all day. Usually there are processes in place to be able to get to see any of this in the first place. But one thing to consider is, if you're in a regulated industry or facing lawsuits or things like that, your company probably is keeping a backup of everything. So that doesn't just include the public channels,

that also includes the private chats, messages you delete, messages you edit, and all of those could come out in like a lawsuit. They could be viewed by your company. And you can hear more about what is and isn't safe to say on work chat apps in today's Your Money Briefing podcast. And that's what's news for this week. Tomorrow you can look out for our weekly markets wrap up, What's News for this week. Tomorrow you can look out for our weekly markets wrap-up, What's News in Markets.

Then on Sunday, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks and the start of the Israel-Hamas war, we'll be answering your questions about the conflict and where it may be headed. That's in What's News Sunday. And we'll be back with our regular show on Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bienneme and Anthony Bansi, with supervising producer Michael Kosmitis. Michael Laval wrote our theme music, Aisha Al-Muslim is our development producer, Scott

Salloway and Chris Sensley are our deputy editors, and Philana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. I'm Tracy Hunt. Thanks for listening.