NLPC Calls Out GM Over Its EV Fantasies and Its Risks in China

On Tuesday, National Legal and Policy Center presented a “Communist China Risk Audit” proposal at General Motors Company’s annual meeting that would require the company to produce a report that addresses its vulnerabilities related to its extensive business in the communist country.

GM chairwoman and CEO Mary Barra, pictured above, presided over the meeting.

The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on pages 98-99 in its proxy statement.

NLPC filed a proxy memo, which includes its response to the board’s opposition statement, with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month.

Speaking as sponsor of the resolution was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. His three-minute remarks, which you can listen to here, follow:

A little over two years ago, General Motors and CEO Mary Barra announced that 100 percent of the passenger vehicles the company will sell in the year 2035 will be powered by electricity.

 

This has nothing to do with climate change, as has been claimed.

 

Whatever plans GM has to go electric, or any other company’s plans to electrify, will not change the planet’s global temperature one bit.

 

Meanwhile a switch to a fully electric-powered fleet, and an electric-powered economy for that matter, is impossible, whether you examine it in terms of energy physics, in terms of supply and demand, in terms of basic economics, or in terms of geopolitics.

 

Even 12 years from now.

 

Even if GM could get its hands on all the battery metals like cobalt, nickel, lithium and other materials that it needs to make such a conversion, that wouldn’t eliminate all the other logistical problems of creating an electric fleet, or zeroing out greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Unless GM is willing to pitch in and fix nearly unsolvable problems like electric grid overhaul, like expansion of battery charging stations, like renewable power generation and storage, like NIMBY opposition to wind and solar, and a host of other obstacles, then all that an electric fleet will get you is dependence on nuclear, coal and natural gas, instead of oil and gasoline.

 

So, I repeat, GM’s all-electric assertions are a fantasy, and have zero to do with climate change.

 

Now what GM’s aspirations are REALLY about are profits – which they should be.

 

And the real pursuit by allegedly going all-electric is for GM to get its hands on all the billions of dollars in subsidies from the badly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

 

But this is short-sighted on the part of GM and Ms. Barra, as political winds shift constantly.

 

This shortsightedness is also revealed in GM’s response to our shareholder proposal, which seeks greater transparency about the Company’s risks of doing business in, and with, the Communist Chinese government.

 

Perhaps most disturbing about GM’s pursuit of electric vehicles is that the vast majority of battery metals that will be needed are controlled by entities under China’s control.

 

Company officials tried to assure me that they are trying to diversify GM’s supply chain to reduce dependence on Chinese-owned mines.

 

But I am not convinced that GM is making much progress on that, considering its long-standing co-ownership of an automobile company with Communist China, and Ms. Barra’s recent visit there.

 

And now we learned in today’s Wall Street Journal that China is planning a joint military training base to be located in Cuba, just 100 miles from our coast – which only heightens the threat the Communist nation is to our country.

 

Shareholders deserve far more transparency about GM’s risks in China than it is disclosing.

 

Please vote FOR Shareholder Proposal Number 5.

Read NLPC’s proposal for General Motors Company’s annual shareholder meeting here.

Read NLPC’s proxy memo in support of its proposal, filed with the SEC, here.

Listen to Chesser’s three-minute remarks presenting the proposal here.