Poverty Is no accident
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First, kill our fossil fuel industry.
WSJ: President Biden’s energy program is crystal clear: an all-of-government assault on the domestic fossil-fuel industry to further a green agenda. But its economic and political fallout is a muddled contrast. The Biden plan distorts or undermines so many other domestic and international priorities that it is in dire need of a midcourse correction.
The administration’s efforts, led by climate czar John Kerry and propelled by the progressive wing of Mr. Biden’s coalition, have included curtailing new leases for drilling, preventing new pipeline development, and expanding the areas off-limits for production. The Securities and Exchange Commission has discouraged new financing of fossil-fuel projects. New automobile mileage standards and increased mandates for ethanol blending in gasoline are part of the program. Pressure to phase out coal-fired electricity production and thwart new mining projects also contribute to the higher prices deemed the best tool to force the transition to a green-energy infrastructure.
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Then throttle and kill off domestic mining
WSJ, April 3, 2022: 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?
As Mr. Biden notes, government 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.
Yet the 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. “Protecting species like Tiehm’s buckwheat is the only way we can stop the extinction crisis,” the Center for Biological Diversity says. But isn’t green energy supposed to prevent species extinction?
An inconvenient truth for the left is that mining requires enormous amounts of water and land and generates many toxic byproducts. But the U.S. maintains stringent environmental standards for mining, and minerals that aren’t mined here will be extracted where there are little to no such standards.
That hasn’t stopped the Biden Administration from blocking a proposed copper mine in Minnesota and taking steps to slow another in Arizona. Regulators in February suspended a right-of-way for a road in Alaska, granted by the Trump Administration, that provided access to one of the world’s largest mineral deposits including zinc and copper.
