His intentions may not be nefarious, but President Biden’s gas tax holiday is absolutely an exercise in bureaucratic buffoonery.
Last week, the president called on Congress to suspend the federal gas tax for three months. He claims that by doing this, it will provide some much-needed relief at the pump — and there’s a shred of truth to that.
The federal gas tax is $0.184 per gallon.
Most folks in the U.S. use about one gallon of gas per day. So with this federal gas tax holiday, drivers would save about $6 per month.
I’m not saying we all couldn’t use a spare $6, but in the grand scheme of things, this is little more than an accounting error — particularly when you consider inflation is at around 8% right now.
The truth is a federal gas tax holiday isn’t even worthy of being considered a Band-Aid.
Of course, everyone’s looking for solutions here.
Some call for more production.
Others are calling for adding more biofuels to our transportation fuel mix.
And, of course, there’s always the “why don’t we just release more from our strategic reserves” argument.
But all of these suggestions ignore a very uncomfortable truth…
As long as we continue to rely on the outdated internal combustion engine, we will continue to be held hostage by the shackles of fossil fuel reliance.
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The Only Protection Against High Gas Prices
I’ve been saying this for nearly 20 years now…
One of the best hedges against high gas and diesel prices is vehicle electrification.
Even with having to rely on imported battery materials in the near term, over the long haul, an honest investment in the transition from internal combustion to vehicle electrification will bear the fruit of stronger national security and financial stability for the poor and middle class.
This is particularly true when you consider eventually nearly every material used in an electric vehicle battery will be produced domestically either through resource extraction — and make no mistake, resource extraction in the U.S., Canada, and the EU is far more sustainable than resource extraction in China, Africa, and South America — or through battery recycling plants that are likely to become instrumental in the long-term economic sustainability of EV battery production.
In fact, just last month, Norsk Hydro (OTCBB: NHYDY) announced that its battery recycling joint venture with a company called Northvolt started commercial operations.
The recycling plant currently has enough operational capacity to process 12,000 tonnes of battery packs every year, which equates to about 25,000 EV batteries. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The company is now looking to expand its recycling capacity with a target of recycling 70,000 tonnes of battery packs by 2030, or the equivalent of about 500,000 EV batteries.
Most folks tend to look at recycling measures as the domain of environmentalists and moral do-gooders. But this is all about creating an economically sustainable electric vehicle battery manufacturing industry that will be necessary to take us out of the dark ages of internal combustion and into the future of vehicle electrification.
I for one have already been profiting from this transition, and new opportunities in this space are popping up every day.
In fact, my good friend and colleague Keith Kohl recently published a report on EV battery recycling that includes the name and ticker symbol of the only operational EV battery recycling plant in North America. It just landed an additional $250 million in direct investments from two of the biggest players in the EV game, and quite frankly, it has zero competition in the North American market.
You can check out Keith’s complete analysis here.
To a new way of life and a new generation of wealth… Jeff Siegel
@JeffSiegel on Twitter
Check us out on YouTube!Jeff is the founder and managing editor of Green Chip Stocks. For more on Jeff, go to his editor’s page.
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