(Ben Weingarten, RealClearWire) President Biden’s stance toward China hardened this month when he issued an executive order prohibiting American investment in Chinese companies developing advanced technologies that could be used by the military.
But a growing chorus of critics, including some Democrats, argue that the administration’s effort to grapple with America’s foremost adversary is contradictory, illustrated in the White House’s Beijing-empowering pursuit of ambitious climate change goals.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, as the White House has called for, will almost assuredly make the United States dependent on China while enriching it.
China currently holds a commanding position in the clean energy industry, controlling the natural resources and manufacturing the components essential to the Biden administration’s desired alternative energy transition. Energy experts believe that its dominance will become more entrenched in the years ahead because of domestic environmentalist opposition to perceived “dirty” mining and refining operations, and the Biden administration’s “clean energy” spending blitz – which could provide Chinese companies and subsidiaries billions in subsidies.
The Biden administration also considers it imperative to get buy-in from Beijing on dramatically reducing emissions, given it produces more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions globally.
This too gives critics of the Biden administration’s green agenda pause. They see China as an unreliable partner that will leverage the Biden administration’s desire for it to go green to its own advantage.
“China,” says Senator John Barrasso (R-Wy.), the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, “is playing us for suckers.”
China’s alternative energy clout comes from its command over supply chains that culminate in the production of wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries on which the net zero transition depends.
On top of its own large domestic reserves, it has invested in mines worldwide, and grown into a global hub for raw material refining and processing. China underscored this point on the eve of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit last month, when it imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, rare earth metals not only critical to the manufacture of semiconductors, but also found in electric vehicles and solar panels.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, China is the leading producer of 30 of 50 minerals, including among them rare earth metals, that the U.S. government deems critical, particularly for their usage in energy technologies.
Rare earth metals are integral to the magnets key to electric vehicle motors and wind turbines. America is 95% net import reliant on such materials, which China produces 70% of globally. According to the International Energy Agency, the PRC dominates “across the [rare earth] value chain from mining to processing and magnet production.”
Other critical minerals for clean energy technologies include: copper, key to solar cells, wind turbines, and electric vehicles; cobalt, key to lithium-ion batteries; nickel, also key to such batteries and in renewable energy storage; and lithium itself. China is the world’s largest refiner of all these minerals and produces 50-70% of all lithium and cobalt globally. The U.S. has no refining capacity for many of the same materials.
In analyzing the International Energy Agency’s authoritative “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap, the Energy Policy Research Foundation concluded, in a report supported by the RealClearFoundation (which also funds RealClearInvestigations), that “replacing oil and gas with metal-intensive renewables and batteries risks further reinforcing China’s dominance in these critical minerals, at the expense of the energy security of most of the world.”
