ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING, BUT WITHOUT COPPER

ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING, BUT WITHOUT COPPER

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ELECTRIC VEHICLES, ENERGY POLICY

Liberals want to electrify everything, from your car to your stove. But they also don’t want to mine copper. Like so many things liberals do, this makes no sense. You might as well believe in fairy dust as in “green” energy.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on this:

The Biden Administration is heavily subsidizing electric vehicles, but at the same time it is blocking mineral projects needed to produce them. Another example of this head-scratching contradiction came Thursday when Interior Secretary Deb Haaland walled off much of Minnesota’s Superior National Forest from mining.

Minnesota’s Duluth Complex has one of the world’s largest undeveloped mineral deposits, including copper, nickel and cobalt that are needed in vast quantities for EV batteries. Ms. Haaland is assuring the deposit stays undeveloped by signing an order withdrawing more than 225,000 acres in the Superior National Forest from mining for two decades.

The Biden administration is intentionally forcing the U.S. to depend on unreliable and hostile governments for our survival:

Most graphite…is currently mined or manufactured from coking coal in China. Very environmentally friendly.

The reality is that if minerals aren’t mined in the U.S., they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards. Not that this seems to bother the White House. The State Department this month pledged to help build EV battery supply chains in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. The DRC produces more than 70% of the world’s cobalt, and Zambia is the world’s sixth-largest copper producer.

Actually, we could mine copper, nickel and cobalt here in the U.S. without damaging the environment, as my organization showed back in 2018. But liberals, hell-bent on undermining America’s well-being and independence, don’t care.

Tonight at 6:40 Central, my colleague Isaac Orr is scheduled to be on Jesse Watters’ Fox News show, talking about the absurdity of trying to electrify our economy while at the same time blocking production of the necessary materials.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/01/electrify-everything-but-without-copper.php