Achieving a green-energy future at home, consistent with environmentalist demands, means empowering the Communist regime.
Achieving a green-energy future at home, consistent with environmentalist demands, means empowering the Communist regime.
I n an attempt to even approach the Biden administration’s goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050, Democrats may be selling out the country to China, as Ben Weingarten shows in a recent RealClearInvestigations report.
The Biden administration pushed legislation allocating hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and special tax breaks for wind and solar power. The Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, allocates $369 billion in green subsidies and incentives, while the Defense Production Act has been used to effectively nationalize huge portions of the U.S. economy in favor of the green-energy goal.
“There’s simply no way to solve climate change without China’s leadership,” Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, said in a May 2022 speech.” In March 2023, White House clean-energy czar John Podesta openly said that China would be a “big player” in Biden’s plans for green-energy production and electric-vehicle manufacturing.
Since China currently dominates the very natural resources and manufacturing sectors that the Biden administration has deemed essential to its energy aims, China will be a major beneficiary of Biden’s green agenda. Biden appears to even want it that way.
The president has repeatedly misused his authority to legally block the development of key American uranium resources, forcing American nuclear reactors into dependence on Russia for fuel. Other recent actions include sealing off 95 percent of America’s nickel reserves, 88 percent of the country’s cobalt, 51 percent of its platinum, 48 percent of its palladium, and 34 percent of its copper. Biden has also moved to block innovative deep-sea mining, with the U.S. Special Presidential Climate Envoy John Kerry stating that the president is “very wary of procedures that could disturb the ocean floor.”
This is despite the fact that the U.S. Geological Survey under Biden admits that these metals — whose only practical alternative suppliers at the necessary scale are China and Russia — are utterly essential for the green technologies the administration has chosen to rely on.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that Hunter Biden helped “secure cobalt for the Chinese” in 2016, while his father was vice president. Cobalt is a key material for wind- and solar-power storage and for the manufacture of the batteries necessary for electric cars. Shortly after Biden took office, America’s newest cobalt mine shut down after several environmentalist lawsuits, while Chinese efforts to consolidate control over the global supply are ongoing.
Perhaps due to environmentalists’ ostensible objections to allegedly “dirty” mining operations in the U.S., the Biden bureaucracy openly admits that the materials for its “clean energy” spending blitz will be provided by Chinese and Russian companies, diverting hundreds of billions of American tax dollars to Beijing and Moscow.
But that’s not the worst of it.
While Republicans on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology review China’s usurpation of U.S. cash in 20 federal infrastructure grants to battery-tech firms, elected Democrats, consistent with the White House’s Beijing-empowering climate goals, apparently want to hand over even the manufacturing of EV-batteries to China.
China dominates the supply chains for the wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries on which the Biden energy agenda depends. Ten of the world’s top-15 wind-turbine manufacturers are Chinese, and Chinese manufacturing accounts for 80 percent of solar panels and batteries, according to a recent report by the Energy Policy Research Foundation.
This buildup of Chinese green capacity is almost exclusively for export to the West. Domestically, China relies mainly on conventional oil and coal energy, with coal providing 61 percent of the country’s electricity in 2022. This number has been roughly unchanged for over a decade. The Chinese government stopped building new wind turbines because most of the new electricity created was wasted, causing serious damage to the country’s electrical grid. But it’s more than happy to sell such sub-par technology overseas. China currently commissions two new coal-power plants every week. Because of energy insecurity stemming from the war in Ukraine, China quadrupled the number of regulatory approvals it granted to new coal-power plants in 2022 compared with the prior year.
“Everybody else is moving away from coal, and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” Flora Champenois, a coal research analyst at Global Energy Monitor, told NPR. “We saw that China has six times as much [sic] plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined.”
But America’s strategic interests aren’t the only things pro-China environmentalists are selling out. American values are also on Biden’s menu. Outright slave labor in China provided a shocking 42 percent of production of the kind of silicon used to manufacture solar panels, and the authoritarian nation’s dominance of the solar market is expected to grow.
While the Biden administration is pushing dubious progressive interpretations of the history of slavery, and despite their obsession with American slavery, which ended 160 years ago, few on the political left seem to care in the slightest about purchasing slave-made solar panels. The White House claims that America “can have solar energy and still stand up for human rights,” and Kerry says the Chinese Communist Party’s use of slave labor to produce solar panels is “not my lane.”
Given that the Biden family has deep financial ties to the Chinese regime, it’s no wonder that many Democrats are reluctant to notice the inconsistencies in the administration’s green agenda. The hypocrisy would be almost comical if it wasn’t so tragic. Achieving a green-energy future at home, consistent with environmentalist demands, means empowering China.