Are we watching a replay of King Canute commanding the waves to recede? That thought occurred to me while reading about the Biden administration’s latest step in advancing the president’s 2021 goal of having half of all new autos be electric by 2030.

The analogy isn’t exact — current thinking is that Canute knew his courtiers were wrong when they said he could stop the incoming tide. And the king was apparently in his 30s, with no sign of cognitive impairment, at that moment by the seashore. But consider it anyway.

The analogy was prompted by the Environmental Protection Agency’s order last week regulating tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions of model year 2027 to 2032 cars, SUVs and pickup trucks. It was clearly intended to force automakers to produce electric vehicles so that they’d account for two-thirds of sales in 2032 — roughly 10 times the 6% share they accounted for in 2022.

White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi expresses confidence that “the ingenuity of American workers and American industry” can produce this enormous manufacturing and supply chain transformation — all of which sounds like the courtiers’ confidence that Canute could command the waves.

The head of the chief automakers’ lobby is obviously skeptical. “Whether we have the necessary condition in the marketplace and in the industrial base,” he told the Wall Street Journal, are “critical conditions that we need to continue to examine.”

Among those conditions is whether automakers can procure the raw materials to produce so many electric vehicles. That includes, energy analyst and historian Daniel Yergin says, about two and a half times as much copper as gas-powered vehicles. That will be tough.

Nearly half the world’s copper is produced in politically unstable Peru and Chile. A big new mine opening in Mongolia is inconveniently landlocked between China and Russia. And car batteries require cobalt, some 70% of which is produced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under working conditions you don’t want to know about.

Then there’s the little detail about where electric car owners are going to get the electricity to keep their vehicles going. There aren’t many charging stations available now. Even if there were, America would need a lot more electricity than it generates now in order to power an electric vehicle fleet that large. And the U.S. electricity supply has actually been getting less reliable.

Thanks to environmentalists, America has been phasing out nuclear and coal-fired plants, which can reliably increase production to meet high demand. The nation depends increasingly on wind- and solar-produced electricity, which is only reliable when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining — not all the time in most of North America.

By the way, the states with the biggest political support for renewables don’t, unfortunately, have much reliable wind and sunshine. Current wind production is highest in the Great Plains, including Texas. Solar power provides only 16% of California’s electricity, whereas hydropower is limited outside the Pacific Northwest.