The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer and former Detroit News business reporter, writes a blog, Starkman Approved.
By Eric Starkman
CEO Mary Barra and Gov. Gavin Newsom
GM CEO Mary Barra insists electric vehicles are the automaker’s “north star.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom says Barra talks out of both sides of her mouth and is a phony baloney when it comes to clean energy commitments.
As a Californian who knows Newsom himself is often full of BS, I’ll concede: this is one of those instances where he actually knows what he’s talking about.
“Mary Barra sold us out, eliminating Ronald Reagan’s work, eliminating the progress we made under the California Air Resources Board in 1967, where we began regulating tailpipe emissions,” Newsom charged. “The Republicans rolled that back this year under Donald Trump’s leadership, but the American automobile manufacturers allowed that to happen. GM led that effort.”
California has long pushed to phase out sales of internal-combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2035 and adopted aggressive clean-car regulations. GM is reportedly leading the charge in Congress to block the state’s 2035 ban on new gasoline-powered cars—a policy California regulators estimated would cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 35%.
Yet on GM’s website, the company pledges “to become carbon neutral in global products and operations by 2040.” Barra has repeated endlessly in the media that EVs are GM’s “north star.” You’d think GM would be cheering California’s ICE crackdown, since it would create a captive market for the EVs Barra can’t seem to get even Californians to buy. GM isn’t a popular brand in the state.
Adding fuel to the fire: Duncan Aldred, GM’s North America president, recently dismissed President Biden’s $7,500 EV subsidies as “irrational.”
That’s awkward, since Barra was reportedly close with Biden. One of Biden’s closest aides, Steve Ricchetti, is a former GM lobbyist. His brother Jeff continued to lobby for GM while Biden was in office. And Biden’s niece Missy Owens joined GM in 2022 and serves as “executive director global sustainability policy,” according to her LinkedIn profile.
Biden made Barra the poster child of his EV agenda. “You changed the whole story, Mary,” he gushed during a November 2021 visit to a GM EV factory in Detroit. “You electrified the entire automobile industry. I’m serious.”
And those generous subsidies Biden hailed? They extended to the EVs GM churns out in Mexico, where GM just happens to be that country’s biggest automaker.
Barra has always blown with the political winds. She backed Trump’s efforts to strip California of its authority to set fuel efficiency standards, only to shamelessly reverse course after Biden’s election.
“President-elect Biden recently said, ‘I believe that we can own the 21st century car market again by moving to electric vehicles.’ We at General Motors couldn’t agree more,” Barra wrote in a letter to environmental leaders.
Barra’s media defenders will say it’s just smart business to straddle the political divide. Maybe so—but I can’t think of another CEO who does it so brazenly. Toyota, to its credit, bravely withstood repeated U.S. media beatings and refused to embrace Biden’s EV mandates, correctly noting that American consumers weren’t yet ready to fully adopt electric vehicles.
Yet Toyota, unlike GM, hasn’t retreated from any of its EV expenditure commitments in the U.S. The character and resolve of Toyota’s management helps explain why Toyota is a bigger and more profitable company than GM.
Moreover, cozying up to Trump isn’t going to make Barra popular in California, the biggest market for EVs.
Barra is so coddled by the corporate press that she’s never held accountable for her promises.
She pledged in 2021 that GM would outsell Tesla in EVs by the end of this year. It won’t. She hyped GM’s driverless taxi Cruise subsidiary as a $50 billion business by decade’s end. Barra shuttered the business last year. She vowed Detroit would remain GM’s headquarters—after shipping 4,000 employees from the city to the company’s Tech Center in Warren.
And while professing confidence in GM’s future, Barra recently dumped about 40% of her stock holdings after spending $25 billion in stock buybacks to prop up GM’s underperforming shares under her leadership. Barra has received more than $300 million in compensation since assuming command 11 years ago.
Newsom should thank Barra. At least four of GM’s top executives are based in its rapidly growing Silicon Valley office, which might soon outnumber the senior execs who eventually take up residence in Dan Gilbert’s Hudson’s tower in Detroit—a project heavily subsidized by taxpayers that GM calls its “global headquarters.”
GM, naturally, won’t disclose which executives will even work out of the building, separated from the company’s engineers and designers in Warren.
So yes, Gavin Newsom is often a blowhard. But when it comes to Mary Barra and her shape-shifting clean-energy act, his phony baloney jab hits the mark. Oscar Mayer should brand a line of deli meats in Barra’s honor.
Contact Eric Starkman at eric@starkmanapproved. Anonymity assured.
