President Biden’s push for Americans to stop using fossil fuels and fuel-powered cars is empowering China and hurting U.S. national security, according to a new report.
The Institute for Energy Research (IER) released a paper outlining how the ongoing effort by the Biden administration to get Americans to use renewable energy and buy electric vehicles is making the U.S. more dependent on China, thereby endangering America’s national security.
“Due in large part to government intervention, the United States is becoming progressively more reliant on electric vehicles (EVs) and nonnuclear renewable energy sources for its transportation and energy needs,” writes Thomas Wackman, a fellow at IER. “These technologies rely on a large input of rare earth metals and other mined elements, particularly lithium and cobalt, the supply of which is dominated almost entirely by the People’s Republic of China.”
The Biden administration’s “ongoing war” against domestic U.S. oil and gas production, the report continues, puts America’s energy security, and its national security, in real jeopardy.”
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President Biden controversially vowed to “end” and “get rid of” fossil fuels while campaigning for president. Since entering the White House, he has said his goal is to create a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.”
Biden has also committed by 2030 to cut U.S. fossil fuel emissions by 52% in favor of renewable energy such as wind and solar power and for half of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be electric.
In 2021, renewables comprised about 12% of America’s primary energy consumption, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and many politicians appear intent on getting that number much higher.
“However, renewables need far higher mineral inputs than their hydrocarbon counterparts,” the IER report states. “An electric vehicle, for example, requires six times the mineral resources than does a similar gasoline-powered car. While some of this demand can be filled by familiar metals like nickel, copper, and aluminum, less common minerals like lithium and cobalt play a key role, as do many so-called ‘rare earth” elements.’”
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According to the EIA, the process of trying to eliminate carbon will cause the demand for these materials to skyrocket.
“Therein lies the danger: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controls almost the entire global supply chain for all these minerals and other strategic metals,” the paper warns. “In fact, the United States is far more dependent on Chinese imports for an increasingly important part of its energy portfolio than it ever was on the Middle East for oil supplies.”
China is a major producer of many of the dozens of minerals identified by the U.S. Department of the Interior as critical to national security and either owns or indirectly controls most of the world’s mines that produce them. For example, China has been involved in projects in Sub-Saharan Africa in search of cobalt and lithium deposits to maintain its influence over the mineral supply chain.
In contrast, “what rare earth and strategic metal extraction capacity the United States does possess is limited,” according to the Institute for Energy Research. “Political interests have restricted mineral exploration within the United States, leaving potentially vast reserves of strategic metals and rare earths untouched. As of this writing, only one mine in the entire country, California’s Mountain Pass mine, can produce rare earth elements.”
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U.S. leaders in both Congress and the executive branch have increasingly spoken of China as America’s chief rival across a range of domains, from industrial power to military might, arguing for a tougher approach toward Beijing.
“The more that the United States transitions its energy portfolio over to renewables at the expense of other sources — something for which the Biden administration and its environmentalist allies are outwardly committed to doing — the more dependent it becomes on its primary adversary for its energy supply,” the report argues. “To make matters worse, alternative energy is far from the only technology that relies on critical minerals to function. Almost every aspect of the digital economy, from smartphones to computers to internet cables, can only be manufactured with metals largely imported from China. So do a vast array of military weapons systems, including guided missiles, radar arrays, and even night vision goggles.”
As a result, according to the IER, if China were to cut off or even just restrict the flow of rare earths and strategic metals, U.S. military power would be crippled.
“More than that,” the report states, “economic activity could grind to a halt, as it becomes near impossible to repair old or produce new digital products. Regions that are key to the American economy, like Silicon Valley and Florida’s Space Coast, would virtually cease to function. Energy shortages, too, could become common, especially in those states which have transitioned a substantial part of their energy portfolio over to renewable sources and their automobile fleet to EVs.”
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However, renewables now comprise a relatively small portion of U.S. energy production, and nuclear reactors are also running, seemingly lessening such a risk — for the time being.
When reached for comment, the Energy Department didn’t address the IER report, instead touting its work to promote EVs and what it described as clean energy.
“Thanks to President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the U.S. has become the world’s most attractive investment landscape for new energy and decarbonization technologies,” an Energy Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “Since President Biden took office, there’s been more than $90 billion of announced investments in an American-made EV batteries, helping onshore jobs for American workers and strengthen the nation’s manufacturing sector. DOE will continue to move expeditiously to usher in a managed and equitable clean energy transition.”
The spokesperson never mentioned China but acknowledged “challenges” must be addressed regarding critical materials, saying “responsible” domestic efforts to produce such materials will strengthen America’s economic competitiveness, energy independence, and national security.
The IER report calls on the Biden administration to stop “targeting the [oil and gas] industry with burdensome regulations and rhetorical assaults” so domestic producers don’t scale-down their operations, thereby driving up prices and possibly causing the U.S. to seek more foreign energy. But it also says the U.S will inevitably include a growing share of EVs and renewable energy, meaning other action is required.
“It should therefore be considered a national security imperative for the United States to wean itself off Chinese strategic metals and rare earths and to develop its own extraction and refining capacity,” the paper concludes. “The government must support new mines, new processors and new refiners, while removing the roadblocks to industrial development and capital investment that created this situation in the first place.”
Such processing facilities can be expensive and must navigate environmental restrictions placed on mineral extraction in the U.S. and allied Western countries that China doesn’t have.
The U.S. is endowed with the critical minerals needed for EVs, wind turbines, solar panels, and even military equipment, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. However, according to a separate IER report published this week, the Biden administration “is revoking leases, delaying permits, and listing plants as endangered species to hinder critical mineral mine development to please its environmental friends, who do not want mining to occur in the United States while calling for the use of technologies requiring multiples of additional minerals consumption.”
In order to address the critical minerals issue, the administration is currently pursuing trade agreements focused on such minerals with allies in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, both to allow them to qualify for EV tax benefits and to begin shifting energy supply chains away from China.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.