What federal housing? Section 8 has been worked over for decades.
Espionage gets you a long, long stretch in Federal prison. Doesn't matter who you are. CEOs can get out of a lot of things, but if you're spying for a hostile government (probably even if you're spying for a friendly one), they throw the book at you.
It would be nice though if EV batteries used less materials that are horribly rare, environmentally unfriendly and only mineable in parts of the world that are not very friendly.
The materials used to make EV batteries are
not horribly rare. There's huge deposits in North America and Europe. North America and Europe also have environmental protection (and worker safety!) laws. Those are expensive to comply with (especially in start-up costs), and the price of the materials in question has historically been quite low due to fairly low demand. Thus mining in the developed world was never cost effective. As demand rises the prices will go up, and the viability of mining said huge deposits becomes an actual thing.
It's a shame, really. EVs are a so much better experience than ICE vehicles even taking into account the need for different infrastructure and more trip planning. I don't honestly know why it became such a political issue.
There's a couple of big reasons. The biggest is lobbying, but not from the source you expect - the fossil fuel companies have long seen this coming and have been investing heavily to make sure they still profit. They're pushing against EVs, but they're nowhere near the main issue. The much bigger lobby bloc is
car dealerships. Most dealerships don't make all that much money (as a percentage of their revenue) on selling the car. They make it on service contracts - and the majority of the stuff that gets routine maintenance on cars simply
doesn't exist on an EV. Nor do a lot of the parts that often break. This means that each EV they sell produces much less of a long-term revenue source than selling a gas car does, even factoring in that most EV owners currently
have to use the dealership because most auto shops aren't yet equipped to handle EVs. Making matters worse, there aren't many bare-bones EVs out there (even the low end stuff like the Bolt or LEAF are pretty full-featured) so there's not nearly as much room for upselling, and the profit margin is thinner on EVs in general. Worst of all, thanks to Tesla's successful direct-to-consumer marketing even the Big Automakers are starting to wonder if there's even a reason for dealerships to
exist anymore.
This is also an area where the GOP has found a fear that actually resonates with union workers (a traditionally Democrat voting bloc). There is a lot of fear that EVs will result in fewer jobs in existing auto plants because EVs inherently have fewer parts, or that automakers will use "well, we need a factory tooled for EVs!" as an excuse to shut down union factories in Toledo or Detroit and open non-union factories in other cities. Even worse, there is a fear that much of the feeder industry for the auto industry will dry up and vanish - the guy who gets paid $25 an hour on a machine stamping out gas tanks or mufflers is going to fear the rise of a car that doesn't use gas tanks or mufflers. These concerns are overblown, because the EV transition is going to take long enough (in the best case) that the job loss will be handled by less hiring rather than layoffs, and it won't be as severe as people fear. But they are real fears, and exploiting such fears is the oldest trick in the political book.
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