The president faces a dilemma this week on whether to overturn a trade commission ruling and allow a major battery factory to be completed.
President Joe Biden’s ambitious electric vehicle plan has run into a huge hurdle with U.S. trade law, forcing him to choose between swing-state jobs and American intellectual property rules that have come under intense scrutiny during the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House has laid out electric vehicle goals in its latest infrastructure plan, aiming to convert all federally owned vehicles to electric, deploy hundreds of thousands of charging stations and provide generous customer rebates to get new models rolling out of dealerships. Meeting those goals will require a surge in advanced batteries, and that’s where one problem lies. Even without new government programs, automakers plan to offer more than 200 electric or hybrid car models in the U.S. market by 2024. That’s on top of demand from electric utilities, which increasingly use similar lithium-ion batteries to stabilize the power grid. One of the factories slated to help meet that demand is a $2.6 billion plant in Commerce, Ga., being built by South Korean battery maker SK Innovation. If the plant is completed, the firm says, it will employ 2,600 workers and provide batteries for a suite of Volkswagen vehicles, as well as the electric version of the Ford F-150, the single most popular vehicle in the country. But construction of the landmark facility is being threatened by an international trade dispute. The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in February that SK Innovation stole trade secrets from rival South Korean company LG Chem, and ordered that the U.S. block SK from importing components to build batteries. Although the independent agency gave a two-year grace period for Volkswagen and a four-year cushion for Ford, SK says the ruling will likely force it to abandon the factory. That’s where the White House comes in. Federal law allows the president and the U.S. trade representative to overrule an ITC decision within 60 days — April 11 in the battery case. “If the president does not disapprove of the ITC decision, I think it’s very hard to envision SK staying in the U.S.,” said Carol Browner, who served as EPA administrator during the Clinton administration and White House climate chief under former President Barack Obama and is now working with SK to pressure Biden. The decision is especially tricky for the Biden administration. Overturning the ITC decision would allow SK to finish its factory, letting the president brag about saving thousands of jobs in a swing state that he won by less than 12,000 votes and that later elected two Democrats to the Senate, giving the party a razor-thin majority. But throwing out the ruling would also undermine intellectual property laws that the U.S. fights to uphold worldwide. And the action would come as the White House resists calls from developing nations at the World Trade Organization to lift intellectual property restrictions for Covid vaccines — sending the message that saving American jobs justifies breaking the rules, while saving lives in developing nations does not.
