Links tagged “china”

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Opposition by green groups to clean energy projects and mining in the Southwest “threatens to significantly slow efforts by the Biden administration and businesses to fight climate change by reducing America’s carbon emissions,” The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday in a story about efforts to stop a solar power project in Moapa Valley. ...

“The Biden administration is at a crossroads, and the Tiehm’s buckwheat is a symbol of our times,” said an overheated press release from Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Will the clean energy transition choose a new path and support our country’s remarkable biodiversity? Or will it opt for business as usual, with mining and development continuing to fuel the extinction crisis that’s bringing our life-support systems to the brink of collapse? There’s only one way forward, and that’s to protect Tiehm’s buckwheat and stop this destructive mine from driving a species to extinction.”

"When I met with my counterparts around the world, it was pretty clear Mike Pompeo showed up to make sure Americans were more prosperous and more secure and safer. When this administration has these conversations, if the other side will offer them a little bit of a carbon reduction, or, worse yet, a promise of some future carbon reduction—kind of like wimpiest burger tomorrow—these folks are willing to trade things that matter the security interests that matter to the American people. So my comments were, we all want clean air, we all want safe drinking water, but to hand over the American economy to bust the American worker to get the Green New Deal done on the back of the American worker does indeed put America behind the interests of other countries.” — Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

Steve Milloy: Joe Biden’s climate plan will put America at the mercy of its superpower rival, China. ... The technologies involved in wind and solar power and electric vehicles are much more reliant than their conventional alternatives on metals and minerals including copper, lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite chromium, molybdenum, zinc, rare-earths and silicon.  ...

Wind and solar technologies require about three to eight times more of these materials per megawatt of electricity than coal and natural gas plants. Electric cars require about five times more of these materials than conventional cars. Joe Biden’s climate agenda involves replacing the coal and gas plants powering our electrical grid with wind and solar farms. He also wants to replace gasoline-powered cars, buses and trucks with electric vehicles.

The IEA reports that China is one of the top three locations for the mining of copper, nickel, rare-earths and lithium. When it comes to mining rare-earths, China is responsible for 60% of global extraction. But there’s more to these essential materials than mining; they must be processed as well. When it comes to processing the ores, China is the leader for all of them plus cobalt, the latter of which is mostly mined in the Congo. China processes about 35% of the global nickel supply, 40% of copper, 55% of lithium, 65% of cobalt and 85% of rare-earths.

President Biden’s decision to order the intelligence community to report on the origins of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic means that the lab-escape scenario can no longer be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The longer that investigations failed to find evidence of the politically favored zoonotic-transmission route, the stronger became the lab-escape scenario as the more plausible explanation. For it is reasonable to assume that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has done everything in its power to help World Health Organization (WHO) investigators uncover evidence to support zoonotic origins of the virus and to have suppressed all available evidence pointing to the possibility of lab escape. ...

In this regard, Beijing has been assisted by spinners of a spurious green narrative that blames modern society’s encroachment on the natural world for the pandemic. First and foremost, there is the WHO and its director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in what increasingly looks like an attempt at a false-flag operation on behalf of the CCP. “The pandemic is a reminder of the intimate and delicate relationship between people and planet,” Tedros declared a year ago. “Any efforts to make our world safer are doomed to fail unless they address the critical interface between people and pathogens.”

Robert Bryce: The academics and bureaucrats who create models that claim we can run the global economy solely on renewable energy live in a different world than you and me. In their world, there is no shortage of money, land, or commodities like copper, cobalt, and lithium. In the modelers’ world, wind turbines don’t slaughter birds and bats by the hundreds of thousands per year...The models also routinely ignore the myriad supply-chain problems that would come from attempting a massive increase in the use of solar panels, including the sourcing of polysilicon from China, and in particular, from Xinjiang province, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are being forced to work for polysilicon manufacturers. ...

“Green” technologies will also require an enormous increase in mining to supply the staggering amounts of copper, cobalt, and other minerals that are required by “green” technologies.