As Europe is witnessing firsthand, relying on authoritarian nations such as China to meet your energy needs is a disaster begging to happen.
As Europe is witnessing firsthand, relying on authoritarian nations to meet your energy needs is a disaster begging to happen.
N early 70 years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union started a race to create the technology that would enable space travel. Within 15 years, the first man walked on the moon, and since then countless expeditions into space have yielded incredible findings for mankind.
Today, we face a similar technological race, but this time it’s here on planet Earth. Governments and private businesses around the world are investing unprecedented resources into new, innovative forms of technology to tackle global warming. From renewables and battery storage to advanced nuclear energy and hydrogen fuel, the transition to clean energy is shifting economic and geopolitical priorities. Clean energy is the oil of the future. The U.S. should seize this opportunity with both hands.
As it stands, we’re allowing China to kick our butts. Once upon a time, the United States had twice the wind capacity of China and five times the solar capacity. A decade later, in 2019, China had utterly surpassed us, deploying three times as much solar and twice as much wind. Likewise, back in 2013 the U.S. market had five times more electric vehicles. Today, China has triple what we have.
Some of this has made us directly dependent on the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese companies, including state-owned ones, are responsible for up to 80 percent of all solar panels installed in the U.S., while the country dominates 90 percent of the global battery-storage industry. Of even bigger concern is that China supplies about 80 percent of the U.S.’s critical minerals, which are key components for clean-energy technologies and military machinery.
The risks for the U.S. are enormous. As Europe is witnessing firsthand, relying on authoritarian nations to meet your energy needs is a disaster begging to happen. In the early 2010s, Angela Merkel made the myopic decision to close Germany’s domestic nuclear and natural-gas industries, only to start importing more fossil fuels from Russia. Now that Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, Germany refuses to ban the very energy imports that are funding the war. In contrast, the U.S. in 2022 has banned Russian oil imports, having become energy-independent in 2019 under President Trump.
China’s growing clean-energy dominance is a geopolitical nightmare. Already, the Chinese Communist Party has used its dominance in critical-mineral processing to assert itself on the world stage. In 2010, China cut Japan off from mineral exports, owing to a fishing-trawler dispute. That incident demonstrated not only China’s ability to disrupt critical-mineral supply chains, but also its brutal willingness to do so. There is no reason why China wouldn’t do this again to the U.S. or our allies, for example. Twelve years later, its dominance in the industry has only grown.
It’s clear that we must decouple from China if we are to avoid a situation similar to the one unfolding in Europe. This means being serious about investing in clean-energy innovation here in the United States and about creating a regulatory environment that stimulates investment, rather than scares it off. It’s also about recognizing that fossil fuels such as natural gas still have a role to play in easing that energy transition, while securing our national security. Progressives clamoring for an immediate transition to 100 percent renewables have no rational policy pathways to achieve that without sinking our economy.
A conversation must also be had on domestic mining. The clean-energy transition will require enormous material inputs such as the critical minerals we source from China. Yet our reliance on the CCP is not for a lack of domestic resources. For example, Bear Lodge, a mountain in Wyoming, is home to America’s largest known deposit of critical minerals, containing around 18 million tons that could help meet U.S. demand for many years. Our permitting process, however, is antiquated, creating a labyrinthine nightmare for potential investors. Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute points out that in the United States it can take up to three decades for a new mine to enter production, whereas in Australia and Canada, for example, it can be achieved within two years. Mining is also much more environmentally friendly in the United States than in China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, another major source of mineral production.
Fortunately, the Biden administration appears to be realizing the importance of secure critical-mineral supply chains. Recently, President Biden invoked Cold War–era powers to kickstart domestic production of these critical minerals under the Defense Production Act. The devil is in the details, but it’s a positive recognition of how insecure our mineral supply chains currently are.
In the 20th century, the space race did not come without challenges or complications, but the United States was able to prevail against the Soviet Union. There is no reason we cannot once again harness the power of American ingenuity to decrease our dependence on the communist regime in China and to power our clean-energy future.