Joanna's testimony and the principles behind it are something that we are almost violently in agreement with. That is to say, there are very important societal reasons for why you want to have a clean transportation grid. However, the way you power that grid is important. The way you power the manufacture of the materials that facilitate that grid is very important.
If you are displacing carbon to a lower cost jurisdiction that has an opacity in how it's administered, how it treats people, how it treats labour and that is using our rules and our willingness to play boy scout around the world so it can flood those markets....
I was in the solar business before this. Don't get me started about the economics of the solar business. China is not the answer.
The strategy is that if we have raw materials in the ground here.... As Joanna said, BloombergNEF says we're the number one jurisdiction. Well, I represent all the suppliers. When can we buy the Canadian cells full of Canadian lithium, nickel, cobalt or graphite? The answer is, “at some point”.
Ford has to buy materials to put in a battery that goes into production here. If that's 2026 or 2027, pick any automaker you like and if the Chinese are ready, they'll sell it to them. If that's the only way to be able to build the vehicles to meet the mandates, we're going to have Chinese batteries.
We need to have the same focus we had in landing EV investments. We need to ask how we are going to get the stuff out of the ground, processed and manufactured into cells that are warrantable.
These tariffs will buy us those five years, but that's what we should spend the next five years doing. That's what should be in our strategy.