A recent report published by the Institute for Energy Research (IER) asserts Biden’s push for Americans to stop using fossil fuels and fuel-powered cars is empowering China and hurting America’s national security.
The Institute for Energy Research (IER) released a paper outlining how the ongoing effort by the Biden administration to get Americans to use renewable energy and buy electric vehicles is making the U.S. more dependent on China, thereby endangering America’s national security.”Due in large part to government intervention, the United States is becoming progressively more reliant on electric vehicles (EVs) and nonnuclear renewable energy sources for its transportation and energy needs,” writes Thomas Wackman, a fellow at IER. “These technologies rely on a large input of rare earth metals and other mined elements, particularly lithium and cobalt, the supply of which is dominated almost entirely by the People’s Republic of China.”The Biden administration’s “ongoing war” against domestic U.S. oil and gas production, the report continues, puts America’s energy security, and its national security, in real jeopardy.” [sic]
Given Biden’s alleged fiscal ties to the communist China and his seeming willingness to aid it at every turn, the results may be a feature rather than a bug.
However, this newfound reliance on “green technology” may get very painful soon. China is considering banning the export of technologies used to produce high-performance rare earth magnets deployed in electric vehicles, wind turbine motors, and other green-tech products.
With the global trend toward decarbonization driving a shift toward the use of electric motors, China is believed to be seeking to seize control of the magnet supply chain and establish dominance in the burgeoning environment sector.Beijing is currently in the process of revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export — a list of manufacturing and other industrial technologies subject to export controls — and released a draft of the revised catalog for public comment in December. In the draft, manufacturing technologies for high-performance magnets using such rare earth elements as neodymium and samarium cobalt were added to the export ban. The solicitation of comments ceased late January and the revisions are expected to be adopted as early as this year.
As other countries struggle to find new sources of rare earth minerals, they are battling environmental regulations along the way.
Concern that Beijing would do this again has prompted the United States and allies such as Canada, Australia and Japan to spend many millions of dollars creating their own supply chains of ‘critical minerals’.One of the main reasons that has not happened already is the fact that processing rare earth is a toxic process that creates wastewater and tailing ponds that leak acids, heavy metals and substances such as cadmium, lead and thorium, a low-level radioactive element, most of which are harmful to human health.
I will simply point out that the end product of fossil fuel combustion, carbon dioxide, is a life-essential gas in trace amounts. Plants thrive when there is more carbon dioxide.
The only thing that appears to be “green” about the new energy is the wealth transfer to China. Of course, with the Chinese trying to position the yuan as a world reserve currency option to the dollar, perhaps the money references should now be changed to red.
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