https://www.newsmax.com/platinum/environmentalists-green-energy-oil-gas/2022/03/25/id/1062862/
Environmentalists Want It Both Ways on ‘Green’ Energy
By John Rossomando
Excerpt: The Biden administration says “green energy” is the magic bullet against rising oil and gas prices that benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine – but environmentalist opposition to the work required to make a “greener” America a reality sets up a Catch-22 in which the U.S. ends up funding its adversaries no matter what.
The administration has made a significant push for what it calls “clean cars and trucks” since coming into office 14 months ago.
“What this is a reminder of is our need to reduce our reliance on oil. The Europeans need to do that. We need to do that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in her March 3 press conference. “If we do more to invest in clean energy, more to invest in other sources of energy, that’s exactly what we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.”
But environmentalist opposition to the domestic mining of lithium and other metals needed to make these electric vehicles has largely gone unreported. The truth, according to the same environmentalists who oppose the Keystone XL pipeline and fracking, is that obtaining the minerals needed to make these vehicles is not “greener.”
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Everything from skyrocketing gas prices to out-of-control food prices are an intended consequence of the environmental radicals’ ideological goals, said Climate Depot editor Marc Morano.
“Their goal for decades, since the 1970s … lamenting that Americans had too much energy available and that people could drive to the market, get a six-pack of beer, and how wasteful that was for the planet,” Morano said. “And [Biden’s] current Energy secretary did a video about gasoline and keeping oil in the ground because of climate.
“This is a situation where their policies have intentionally driven up the costs of energy.”
Morano notes that rare-earth mining in the U.S. has been heavily regulated and restricted in the U.S. since the 1990s. Morano said he interviewed the head of the U.S. office of a Chinese organization, Baotou Rare Earth Company, that mined rare earth metals back in the ’90s, and the leader laughed that China didn’t care about environmental regulations and that it would pick up the business.
[Here is a partial transcript of the American Investigator documentary from 1998 on China mine with Morano and Scott Wheller:
“Baotou Rare Earth Company is well on their way to achieving that goal. After the government raid on Molycorp, Molycorp’s production fell by 17 percent – the exact amount Boatou’s production rose.
Question: Is it safe to assume that Molycorp has to experience a lot more government regulation from the US government than the Baotou mine does from China? Cui: Right, because our company is state owned company. Belongs to the government.
Question: Your company probably doesn’t have to worry about endangered species laws? Cui: It will be decided by our top management.(laughter)]
“By pursuing these Green New Deal-style policies the Biden administration is making us more dependent particularly on China for rare earth mining,” Morano said. “We are outsourcing our pollution to China where they have lower environmental standards than the United States.”
Currently, the U.S. has an almost complete dependence on foreign sources of rare earth metals and lithium, the key mineral needed for electric-vehicle batteries. China dominates the lithium market, which makes the push for electric vehicles a national security issue as well as an environmental one. In 2018, China produced 8,000 metric tons of lithium: 10 times that produced by the U.S. in the same year.
Ironically, environmentalist arguments about how fracking harms the water table also apply to mining lithium and rare earths.
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China controls 85% of the world’s rare earth refining capacity.
The U.S. produces 38,000 tons of rare earth metals that are sent to China for processing. Demand for rare earth metals is only expected to explode in the coming decades as needs increase due to the prevalence of electric vehicles. These minerals also have applications in the windmills that Democrats who are opposed to fossil fuels hope to use for their envisioned “clean energy” future.
The Sierra Club opposes increased domestic mining for lithium and rare earth metals, and it has testified in hopes of discouraging the mining both at home and abroad.
“As the communities and states across the country continue to advance our clean energy economy, we need to address our nation’s reliance on getting critical and rare earth minerals at home and abroad,” the Sierra Club stated in a 2019 press release. “Our country and our clean energy economy need a strategy that is built around the concerns and needs of communities, Tribal Nations, and workers – not the wish lists of the mining industry.”
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“[Environmental activists] love the way China does things because they envy it,” Morano said, noting what he sees as the authoritarian impulses of both the “green” movement and Chinese officials. “China is now supplying about 90% of our solar panels, so they say, ‘Look at how ‘green’ China is because they are producing all of our solar panels.'”
He continued: “Well, we’re making them all rich because they are buying into all of our mandates. But with China building a new coal plant a week, they have no problem with that.”
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