Silver State Times

Back in February, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto announced more than $5.6 million heading into the Sagebrush State to pay for EV charging infrastructure.

The money from last year's Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would be a good thing for Nevada, helping to transition the state into all the "huge benefits" of a burgeoning green economy, Cortez Masto said in her announcement about the funding.

"Our clean transportation sector is booming, promoting good-paying jobs in the state," Cortez Masto said in her Feb. 10 announcement.

The new electric vehicles, EV, will protect the planet and "our children," Cortez Masto said.

"We need to have the infrastructure to support the next generation of transportation in the United States, and that's why I worked in a bipartisan way to make sure the infrastructure law included a first-of-its-kind investment to build out a national network of EV charging stations," she said.

In May, Cortez Masto announced Nevada's share of $3.6 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to boost the production and recycling of batteries in computers and electric vehicles, which would "create good-paying jobs, spur our economic competitiveness."

Cortez Masto's comments line up behind President Joe Biden's administration's talk about good-paying green-economy-generated jobs but the Wall Street Journal reported this week that all that talk doesn't square with reality, which includes the 8,000 jobs being cut by Ford Motor Company. Ford is cutting those jobs to boost its electric vehicle production, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board said in its op-ed published Monday, July 25, under the headline "The False 'Green Jobs' Promise."

"We wish Ford luck," the op-ed concluded. "But when government steers investment, consumers and workers invariably bear the cost. Let's hope taxpayers won't have to bail out automakers if their government-driven EV investments crash and burn."

The op-ed referred to Ford's plans to spend $50 billion to produce 2 million electric vehicles, or "EVs" each year. This would be a "steep ramp-up" from the 27,140 electric vehicles the automaker sold last year.

"The problem is that government climate mandates are driving and distorting investment decisions," the op-ed said.

The op-ed also juxtaposed Ford's job cuts with Biden's earlier comment: "Folks, when I think about climate change—and I’ve been saying this for three years—I think jobs” and United Auto Workers' estimates increased electrical vehicle manufacturing could cost 35,000 union jobs because those greener vehicles require fewer parts.

The op-ed also quoted an unnamed Ford Electrical Vehicle executive who was asked about the job cuts as saying "to move fast in this space, smaller is better," and that "we need to scale EVs quickly in the US, and that is one of the aspirations in the [Biden] Administration."

Keeping up with the Biden Administration's climate change aspirations also has prompted California to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 and it looks like states may follow suit, the op-ed said.

"The Biden Administration recently finalized new greenhouse-gas emission standards that are a de facto EV mandate," the op-ed said. "Traditional automakers will have no choice but to churn out more EVs or buy credits from EV makers such as Tesla and Rivian."

Observations by Wall Street Journal's editorial board came two days after a Bloomberg news story about Ford's plans to cut up to 8,000 jobs "in the coming weeks" to free up profits for the company's electric-vehicle production. Bloomberg, saying it got information about the job cuts from "people familiar with the plan," also referred to Ford CEO Jim Farley's plan to cut $3 billion in costs by 2026 with an eye toward transforming Ford Blue into "the profit and cash engine for the entire enterprise."

Other news outlets, including Reuters, followed up on the Bloomberg report about Ford's planned layoffs.

Last week, Ford signed a deal with Australia-based Ioneer Ltd. to acquire lithium for its electric vehicles from Ioneer's Rhyolite Ridge Project in Nevada. Ford's electric vehicle partner Redwood Materials also plans to start producing EV batteries in Nevada next year.