If you’re looking for a story that neatly encapsulates the mess that the Biden administration is making of energy policy, this Wall Street Journal story takes some beating:
The contradictions of White House energy policy keep piling up. In the latest example, President Biden on Thursday invoked the Defense Production Act to subsidize the mining of certain minerals in the U.S. that his own Administration is using regulation to block. Weird, right?
That opening paragraph ought to be enough, but read on:
[G]overnment climate policies are driving up demand for critical minerals. An electric car includes huge amounts of graphite (66.3 kg), copper (53.2), nickel (39.9), manganese (24.5), cobalt (13.3) and lithium (8.9). Conventional cars require far less—22.3 kg of copper and 11.2 of manganese. Solar and wind also require more of such minerals than do fossil-fuel plants.
Could it be that the environmentally friendly alternative is not quite so environmentally friendly as claimed?
And, geopolitically speaking, it may not be so great either:
Global production isn’t keeping pace with demand, and most mining is done in countries with low environmental and labor standards. Some of these countries aren’t friends of the U.S. and aim to leverage their resources for political advantage. China restricted exports of rare-earth minerals to Japan during a standoff over the Senkaku Islands in 2010.
Beijing has also encouraged investment in foreign mining projects as part of its Belt and Road initiative to lock up critical minerals. This has enabled China to dominate mineral processing and made the West dependent on Beijing for some green technologies.
But don’t we have quite a lot of these metals here in the U.S.?
We do, but as oil and gas producers could tell you, that’s not the end of the matter, and so:
[T]he green lobby in the U.S. wants to keep minerals in the ground, and Biden regulators are helping. Consider Ioneer Ltd.’s planned lithium mine in Nevada, which aims to supply 22,000 metric tons of lithium annually—enough for about 400,000 electric cars. The U.S. has only one operating lithium mine, which produces about 5,000 metric tons per year.
Green groups claim the mine threatens Tiehm’s buckwheat, a rare flowering plant, and accused Ioneer of destroying it. The Trump Interior Department concluded after an extensive analysis that the real wildflower culprit was hungry squirrels.
Then greens asked the Biden Administration to list the buckwheat as an endangered species. Biden regulators proposed a listing, and the lithium mine is now stuck in purgatory . . .
It gets worse, but read on some more and see for yourselves.