With 1,000 coal-fired power stations (and climbing) China's energy pollution mocks the world's bid to combat climate change

The billowing clouds of steam and smoke are visible from miles away. As night falls and the lights turn the sky neon bright as far as the eye can see, the chimneys keep remorselessly pumping out their toxic fumes.

This is the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, one of the biggest industrial complexes in the world.

Sprawling in semi-desert far to the west of Beijing, it covers an area so vast — 341 square miles, more than two thirds the size of Los Angeles — it is almost unimaginable.

Much of The Base, as it is known locally, is home to mines, which produce 130 million metric tonnes of coal a year — about the same as the annual total dug from all 233 deep mines still in use in Britain when coal was our biggest energy source in the 1970s.

The coal — the most polluting of all fossil fuels — is fed into an array of huge power stations at the complex, which have the capacity to generate 17.3 gigawatts. That would be enough to satisfy a third of the UK’s peak demand for electricity.

Also to be found at The Base are 32 companies that use coal to make chemicals, so generating still more carbon pollution.

And on top of all this is the showpiece: the world’s largest coal-to-liquid (CTL) plant, run by the state-owned Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group.

Simply burning coal is dirty enough, producing more carbon dioxide than any other method of generating electricity — almost twice as much as burning natural gas. But making oil from coal is far worse: it can double the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere from every unit of energy.

Yet China’s Shenhua group — now restructured as part of China Energy — has been investing heavily in this hugely polluting CTL plant.

No Western journalist has ever been allowed to visit the site. But in 2017 a Chinese researcher, Xing Zhang, was given a tour by the firm’s vice chairman, Dr Yao Min.

Her findings, written up in a blog for the International Energy Agency (IEA), revealed that Shenhua had by then invested 55 billion yuan — or £6.2 billion — in the CTL plant alone. Each year, the plant turns 20 million tonnes of coal into four million tonnes of oil products; 2.7 million tonnes of diesel; a million tonnes of naptha petroleum; and 340,000 tonnes of liquid gas.

And The Base is not China’s only large CTL plant. There are at least six others in the country that are already built or under construction — and China says it plans to build still more in nations where it has lavished investment, such as Pakistan.

Yet The Base accounts for just a fraction of China’s coal dependency. Its coal power station fleet grew five-fold between 2000 and 2020, and now accounts for almost half the world’s consumption — more than three times its closest rival, the U.S. It is said to have 1,080 separate plants with a total capacity last year of 1,005 gigawatts — and is building more.

Britain, in contrast, has just four coal-fuelled plants left, with a joint output of 5.4 gigawatts. This week, in his apocalyptic climate change speech to the United Nations, Boris Johnson urged China — by far the world’s worst emitter of greenhouse gases, producing as much as 28 per cent of the global total — to end its domestic use of coal.

Mr Johnson is only too aware that if Cop26, the UN climate conference to be held in Glasgow in November, is not to be regarded as a dismal failure, China must be persuaded to make meaningful cuts in CO2 emissions.

But far from carbon emissions slowing down in China, they are increasing ever more rapidly.

This is a country with a mind-boggling pace of development. Between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century. It produces almost 60 per cent of the world’s steel and its oil refinery capacity has tripled since 2000.

Even though it promised last week to stop building coal power stations abroad, China continues to do just that at home. Last year, its coal-powered capacity rose by 38 gigawatts, while the rest of the world cut capacity by 17 gigawatts.

China has a further 105 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the construction pipeline — more than the entire generating capacity of the UK from all sources, including nuclear and renewables.

Last month, the Workers’ Daily reported that in coal-rich Inner Mongolia, 38 mothballed coal mines have been reopened, with an annual production of 60 million tonnes. Last year, Inner Mongolia dug up more than a billion tonnes of coal — and this did not even make it China’s biggest coal province: that honour belonged to Shanxi.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, claimed last year that although Chinese emissions would keep rising until 2030, they would then reach their peak and decline, eventually reaching Net Zero by 2060 — ten years after Britain.

But he has given few details on how this might be achieved, and there are ominous signs that he has no intention of keeping his word. When President Biden’s climate change envoy, John Kerry, went to Beijing this month to put pressure on the regime on carbon emissions, he was humiliated.

Kerry was forced to hold his meetings via Zoom — he might as well have stayed in Washington — and China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, politicised the encounter, warning him that if America wanted China to talk seriously about emissions, it must first stop treating it as ‘a threat and a rival’.

‘Climate change cannot be separated from the larger People’s Republic of China–U.S. relations environment,’ Mr Wang added. By this, he meant China would not contemplate making new pledges on emissions if the U.S. continued to raise awkward issues such as the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, the militarisation of the South China Sea and the enslavement of Muslim Uighurs.

Alok Sharma, the UK minister in charge of Cop26, has admitted he doesn’t know whether President Xi will even show up at the event. An editorial in Chinese Communist newspaper the Global Times told Mr Sharma that if he wants the conference to succeed, he must not let it be ‘held hostage by U.S. political ideologues’.

But while China obfuscates, we in Britain are cutting carbon emissions to the bone, inflicting deep harm on our economy.

The dizzying rise in household bills, and the bankruptcy of so many gas companies, is part of the price we are paying for giving up coal in our rush towards green energy.

As this newspaper reported last month, while we do our bit to slow climate change, it is estimated the cost of our transition to Net Zero will run into trillions of pounds.

Yet even though Britain accounts for less than 1 per cent of global emissions — one 28th as much as China — we still treat the regime with kid gloves, arguing that China deserves leeway because it is still a ‘developing’ country.

Even the eco-protesters blocking our motorways pay no attention to the fact China is pumping out pollution on an unprecedented scale.

Last week, when a BBC reporter asked the group that spawned them, Extinction Rebellion, why they were not demonstrating outside the Chinese embassy, he was accused of ‘perpetuating anti-Chinese racist stereotypes’.

Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which has members in 20 countries, told me this week that ‘governments across the free world have been utterly supine’.

He added: ‘China may say their emissions will peak by 2030 but meanwhile they are building all the new coal-fired power stations they need, to do whatever they please.

‘Yet they are being let off the hook while other countries are being asked to step up to measures that will have an incalculable economic impact. China will watch while we collapse our economies and they become all-powerful.’

Gary Smith, general secretary of the GMB union, thousands of whose members have lost their jobs to Chinese competitors, puts it more succinctly: ‘We are importing virtue and exporting jobs.’

Let us look at how emissions compare with Western countries. China’s total emissions have far outstripped America’s. Indeed, they amount to more than the rest of the developed world put together — although admittedly they are still lower by one measure: America still emits more per head of population.

However, that ceased to be true of Britain in 2014 — and by 2018 China was well ahead, with 6.84 tonnes of CO2 emitted per capita, against 5.3 tonnes in Britain.

To appreciate how fast China’s economy and emissions have grown, consider that in 1990 we emitted 9.6 tonnes per head and China just 1.84 tonnes.

Since 2018, our emissions have continued to fall while China’s have increased. In total, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, they have risen in China by 365 per cent since 1990. In the same period, Britain’s fell by 35 per cent.

Two further indicators reveal how great the impact of cheap energy has been on China’s economy — and give the lie to the claim they are still a ‘developing country’ which deserves to be indulged.

First, carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere a long time, taking up to 200 years to be absorbed by the oceans. This means the emissions a country generates accumulate over time. The quantity of accumulated emissions reveals the degree to which China already dominates world manufacturing.

From 1990 to 2019, China’s accumulated emissions amounted to 167 billion tonnes of CO2. Britain’s were just 14 billion tonnes.

The second point is that the IEA, which produces this data, relies on figures supplied by the Chinese government — and many claim they are unreliable.

In 2019, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post — then still a newspaper that could publish material critical of the Communist regime — reported that the Chinese environment ministry was ‘frequently presented with fake data and fabricated documents’, citing dozens of cases of fraud.

‘The party committee of Bozhou district in Zunyi, southern China, was found to have fabricated notes for ten meetings — part of the work requirement under the new environmental targets — in a bid to cheat the inspectors,’ the paper said.

Which explains why some sources, including Carbon Brief (a green news service) and the Rhodium Group (a New York think-tank), say China’s emissions are far higher than those cited by the IEA.

It is true that China is building wind and solar renewables. But their share of China’s energy mix remains negligible (see graph on previous page), while its coal, gas and oil use expand inexorably.

There are those who say that, despite all this, we should trust China — and Xi’s promise that its emissions will start to fall and eventually reach Net Zero.

Former U.S. vice president and green campaigner Al Gore is an enthusiastic advocate: ‘I think they will overachieve that goal,’ he gushed earlier this year. ‘They put out goals only when they are absolutely certain they can reach them, and they often overachieve.’

Others are more doubtful, none more so than Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong. Speaking to the Mail this week, he recalled how he used to voice scepticism about China in the Nineties, only to be told by diplomat Sir Percy Cradock, a prominent apologist for the country: ‘They may be thuggish dictators but they are men of their word.’

On the contrary, he said this week, ‘they are thuggish dictators but they are NOT men of their word’.

China, he added, has flagrantly breached the Hong Kong handover treaty, which guaranteed basic freedoms for at least 50 years. It has broken its pledges over trade.

And most recently, in the Covid pandemic, it broke the promises it made after the 2002 SARS outbreak to be transparent and notify the World Health Organisation within 24 hours if it discovered a new deadly disease.

‘The idea that you can believe what they say about environmental targets is for the birds,’ Lord Patten said. ‘Again and again, they rat on what they promise. Yet we are told we must be nice to them or they won’t keep their word.

‘I’m sure there are groups in China that want to see a reduction in emissions. That is not the concern of the Communist leadership, which wants to keep on growing, dominate global markets and ensure that Chinese standards of living increase.’

Former Chancellor Lord Lawson, founder of the Global Warming Policy Forum, warned that Boris Johnson cannot afford to be naive. ‘If China doesn’t sign up to immediate cuts in its emissions, instead of continuing to expand the use of the coal on which its industrial stranglehold depends, Cop26 is going to be a stage in an unfolding catastrophe.

‘The soaring price of energy in Britain is already wreaking havoc and it is set to get much worse, leading to bankruptcies, inflation and unemployment. Yet China is getting away with voicing green intentions while its actions demonstrate the reverse.

‘Britain’s acts of self-harm will not help save the planet but merely outsource more jobs to a country wallowing in cheap, coal-fired power. If we want China to realise Xi Jinping’s stated goal of becoming the world’s only superpower by 2049, this is a great way to do it.’

Sir Iain Duncan Smith agreed: ‘We are heading for a great historical disaster. The free world is emasculating itself while China gets stronger and more dominant. They will soon be impossible to resist.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10026335/Chinas-dirtiest-secret-1-000-coal-fired-power-stations-climbing.html

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Uranium: what the explosion in prices means for the nuclear industry

It is a year since Horizon Nuclear Power, a company owned by Hitachi, confirmed it was pulling out of building the £20 billion Wylfa nuclear power plant on Anglesey in north Wales. The Japanese industrial conglomerate cited the failure to reach a funding deal with the UK government over escalating costs, and the government is still in negotiations with other players to try and take the project forward.

Hitachi’s share price duly went up 10%, reflecting investors’ negative sentiment towards building complex, highly regulated large nuclear power plants. With governments reluctant to subsidise nuclear power because of the high costs, particularly since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the market has undervalued the potential of this technology to tackle the climate emergency by providing abundant and reliable low-carbon electricity.

Uranium prices long reflected this reality. The primary fuel for nuclear plants was sliding for much of the 2010s, with no signs of a major turnaround. Yet since mid-August, prices have surged by around 60% as investors and speculators scramble to snap up the commodity. The price is around US$48 per pound (453g), having been as cheap as US$28.99 on August 16. So what lies behind this rally, and what does it mean for nuclear power?

The demand for uranium is limited to nuclear power production and medical equipment. Annual global demand is 150 million pounds, with nuclear power plants looking to secure contracts roughly two years ahead of use.

While uranium demand is not immune to economic downturns, it is less exposed than other industrial metals and commodities. The bulk of demand is distributed across some 445 nuclear power plants operating in 32 countries, with supply concentrated in a handful of mines. Kazakhstan is easily the largest producer with over 40% of output, followed by Australia (13%) and Namibia (11%).

Since most mined uranium is used as fuel by nuclear power plants, its intrinsic value is closely tied to both current demand and future potential from this industry. The market includes not only uranium consumers but also speculators, who buy when they think the price is cheap, potentially bidding up the price. One such long-term speculator is Toronto-based Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, which has bought nearly 6 million pounds (or US$240 million worth) of uranium in recent weeks.

Why investor optimism may be rising

While it is widely believed that nuclear energy should play an integral role in the clean energy transition, the high costs have made it uncompetitive compared with other energy sources. But thanks to sharp rises in energy prices, nuclear’s competitiveness is improving. We are also seeing greater commitment to new nuclear power stations from China and elsewhere. Meanwhile, innovative nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors (SMRs), which are being developed in countries including China, the US, UK and Poland, promise to reduce upfront capital costs.

Combined with recent optimistic releases about nuclear power from the World Nuclear Association and the International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA upped its projections for future nuclear-power use for the first time since Fukushima) this is all making investors more bullish about future uranium demand.

https://theconversation.com/uranium-what-the-explosion-in-prices-means-for-the-nuclear-industry-168442

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The Energy Future Needs Cleaner Batteries

To deal with climate change and power the cars of tomorrow, we’ll have to solve the cobalt problem.

Batteries rely on the specific qualities of certain elements to work. The highest-performing lithium-ion batteries on the market today require cobalt, and cobalt is hard to come by. Most of the known reserves lie under Congo, a country plagued by corruption and frequent wars, where mining often occurs in dangerous, deadly conditions, and not infrequently is done by children. Chinese companies own most of Congo’s mines—clean energy, like dirty energy, has its geopolitics. The metal’s price has fluctuated wildly in recent years.

Solving the climate problem requires solving the battery problem, and solving the battery problem requires solving the cobalt problem.

One way to think about chemical reactions is as the trafficking of electrons. Elements that tend to shed electrons (sodium, for example) react with others that tend to gain them (like chlorine) and are transformed (in that case, into table salt). A battery is a technology for getting in the middle of a reaction like that and detouring the electrons to do work. The battery cell’s negative end, or anode, is made of materials looking to get rid of electrons, and the positive electrode, or cathode, is made from materials looking to acquire them. Between the two is an electrolyte-soaked separator that, impervious to electrons, frustrates the two materials’ desire to react. But when the battery is snapped into a flashlight or TV remote, that device’s circuitry forms a loop placing the battery cell’s two ends in contact. Electrons flow out from the anode and through the wiring, powering the device as they make their roundabout way to the battery cell’s other, positive end. The now ionized atoms that lost those electrons make a parallel trip, migrating directly through the electrolyte membrane to balance out the charge of the cathode’s accumulating electrons. (Otherwise the process would grind to a halt.)

In 1977 an English chemist named M. Stanley Whittingham, then at Exxon Research and Engineering Co., patented a rechargeable battery using lithium as the active mobile ion. Among the discoveries made by Goodenough and protégés such as Manthiram was that the sturdy layered crystal lattice cobalt forms when bonded to oxygen is almost uniquely effective as cathode material. Layered nickel oxide works similarly, but it’s much harder to work with and will degrade more quickly. And cobalt-based cathodes have a further advantage: Thanks to the element’s thermal stability, they’re less likely to light themselves on fire. Sony Corp. adapted Goodenough’s cobalt-oxide design and, in 1991, released a camcorder that was the first of many consumer electronic devices to run on it. (It’s difficult to imagine the iPhone ever catching on if you had to keep replacing the batteries.) In 2019, Whittingham, Goodenough, and Sony’s Akira Yoshino shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their battery work. Goodenough, who was 97, asked Manthiram to give his Nobel lecture for him.

Different electric vehicles use different battery chemistries, but in general the amount of cobalt in them has declined with each new design. Customers less concerned about power and range can buy electric cars with a different cathode design using lithium iron phosphate, a concept Manthiram and Goodenough developed in the ’80s. For years, though, attempts to remove cobalt entirely without degrading battery performance failed.

Cobalt is almost always mixed in with larger deposits of other ores, including nickel, copper, and sometimes platinum group elements. And though cobalt is currently the most valuable battery metal, and the one with the most concerning supply chain, building enough powertrains for a global post-internal-combustion car fleet is going to require a lot more of a lot of metals: nickel and lithium for the cathodes, copper for the wiring, rare earths for the powerful magnets that turn the battery’s electrical energy into torque. Add up all of that, and subtract the world’s known reserves, and you get $10 trillion in what House calls “missing metals.”

It’s important to understand exactly what that means. Cobalt isn’t actually rare. “There’s enough cobalt in the upper 1 kilometer of the Earth’s crust on the continents to build a million electric vehicles for every person on the planet,” House points out. But processing the trace amounts in which almost all of that exists would be economically ruinous. Minerals exploration is about finding the places where the twists and turns of geology have created ore concentrations freakishly large enough that it’s profitable to mine them at today’s metal prices and with today’s extraction and refining methods. “What you need is that nature goes and scavenges the copper and cobalt from a large volume of rock, then creates new rocks that are more like 1% copper or 1% nickel or 1% cobalt,” says Goldman, who serves as both KoBold’s chief financial and chief technology officer. “That’s a really unusual thing.”

What makes finding those deposits difficult is the same fundamental problem metal hunters have faced since the Bronze Age, namely that the Earth’s surface is opaque. Up until modern times, mineral discoveries were made by spotting deposits that were sticking out of the ground: outcrops colored red from oxidized iron or malachite green from copper. Such finds are still in production. North central Europe’s massive Kupferschiefer deposit has been continuously mined since at least 1200 A.D. and likely for thousands of years before.

Today’s explorers have an arsenal of newer tools for divining what lies underground, whether it’s fleets of satellites gathering spectral imagery and gravitational field data or giant metal detector coils towed by helicopters. Even with all that, however, the vast majority of discoveries up until now have been at or near the surface. And in recent years, no matter how much money has been spent on exploration, the trend in discoveries has been steadily downward. “We’re just at this point,” Goldman says, “where the exploration methodologies that allowed us to discover the easy-to-find ore deposits have been nearly exhausted.”

The limited resource, in KoBold’s diagnosis, isn’t ore but human cognitive power. As deposits get farther from the surface, the signals from below get too sparse and faint to be pieced together by even the best geologists. Metal deposits tend to be in remote, hostile places, and existing information about the subsurface is fragmented, inconsistent, and frequently wrong. Collecting new data by sending up an airplane with a magnetometer or shipping a drill rig to the Arctic to drill exploratory boreholes can be slow and very expensive. “These are sparse data environments,” House says, even for a data science company. “This is hugely different from a social media company where people just give them information all the time and they’re awash in it.”

KoBold’s approach is to take the kind of geologists who traditionally lead exploration efforts and yoke their expertise to the methods of data science. The company has created a database for itself out of geological information hoovered up from public and private sources all around the world: everything including academic papers, drill hole chemistry results, airborne and satellite measurements, and barely legible hand-scrawled field reports deciphered by optical character recognition. “People aren’t trying to make these easy to mine for data or easy to consume,” says Joanne Wood, the company’s director of data engineering. “Because essentially if they found something interesting, they would prefer not to share that with the general field.” The trove is searchable by KoBold’s geologists and data scientists, and it forms the corpus on which the company is training a powerful machine-learning algorithm to look for ore.

KoBold isn’t making software to sell to someone else. It’s staked claims, either solely or in joint ventures, in around 20 areas across Australia, Canada, the Central African Copperbelt, Greenland, and the U.S. In early September it announced an exploration alliance with BHP Group Ltd., the world’s second-largest mining group. Those ventures will either turn up ore or they will not. “What I love about KoBold,” says Jef Caers, a Stanford geophysics professor who is a research partner and shareholder in the company, “is that they will face the consequences of their machine learning.”

Caers has worked with KoBold to develop an algorithm for determining the size and shape of an ore body using the fewest possible drill holes. Jake Edman, an atmospheric physicist who’s the company’s director of machine learning, has developed a similar algorithm to choreograph the flyovers of its airborne electromagnetic surveys (the helicopter with the giant metal detector), based on what it does or doesn’t find as it goes. “I know their approach works, because I’ve done it by hand,” says M. Stephen Enders, a 45-year industry veteran who heads the department of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “I’ve gone into parts of West Africa and South America and other parts of the world with teams of geoscientists and all this data. It’s just really labor-intensive that way.” The speed and scale at which KoBold can explore, he argues, “is potentially very powerful.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/future-of-energy-requires-cleaner-electric-batteries-to-solve-cobalt-problem

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Biden’s Climate Plan Would Help Make the Taliban, China More Powerful Than Ever

As President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats continue their push to impose sweeping reforms meant to tackle climate change, the Taliban—with substantial help from China—is positioning itself to take advantage.

In August, Biden signed an executive order designed to drag the United States toward widespread adoption of electric vehicles. The White House says its order aims to make 50% of vehicles sold in America electric or hybrids by 2030.

To call Biden’s goal ambitious would be an incredible understatement. According to sales data recorded in June, fewer than 4% of new cars purchased by Americans were electric or plug-in hybrids, and only a fraction of the electric vehicle infrastructure needed to support millions of additional electric cars is now in place.

To meet Biden’s electric vehicles target—as well as his other climate-related policy objectives, such as making the U.S. energy grid largely dependent on wind and solar power—the U.S. economy would need to be radically transformed.

Far-left Democrats had hoped the infrastructure packages making their way through Congress would be a good start. The $1 trillion infrastructure legislation passed by the Senate included $7.5 billion for new electric vehicle charging stations, and progressive and socialists members of Congress have said they won’t allow infrastructure legislation to pass unless it includes massive new tax credits meant to make electric vehicles more affordable.

For now, both the $1 trillion and $3.5 trillion infrastructure bills have stalled on Capitol Hill, but if Democrats and President Biden have it their way and these bills, along with other legislation and regulatory changes meant to shove America toward wind and solar power, are passed, the Taliban could end up becoming one of the world’s biggest beneficiaries.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest nations on earth. In order to maintain its new chokehold over the country, the Taliban knows it needs to develop steady streams of income and economic alliances. The push by American and European progressives and socialists to impose so-called “green” energy on households might provide the economic opportunities the Taliban desperately needs.

If the United States and Europe were to rely substantially more on electric vehicles and wind and solar generation, it would require millions of tons of rare earth minerals and batteries.

To give you a sense of just how dramatic the need would be, consider that the BBC found “to switch Britain’s 31.5 million petrol and diesel vehicles over to a battery-electric fleet would take an estimated 207,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, and 2,362,500 tonnes of copper.”

There are more than 272 million vehicles in the United States, more than 99% of which run on fossil fuels. Based on the BBC’s analysis of Britain, switching all of America’s gasoline-powered fleet to an electric-only fleet—a long-term goal for Democrats—would require more than 20 million tons of copper, 1.7 million tons of cobalt, and 2.2 million tons of lithium.

The mining and processing demands that would result from a transition to so-called “renewable” energy sources would drive up the price of numerous metals and rare earth minerals around the world, allowing the Taliban to become exceptionally wealthy.

Afghanistan is believed to be home to $1 trillion in mineral deposits, and perhaps the largest lithium deposit on the planet. The Taliban doesn’t have the resources, infrastructure, or skilled workers to mine these valuable assets, but China does, and Chinese officials have already signaled that they have struck a deal with the Taliban to participate “in Afghanistan’s reconstruction and development.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Not only has top Chinese diplomats been meeting with the Taliban for months, China is the world’s number-one supplier of batteries, producing about 79% of the global supply. Additionally, 85% of the world’s capacity to process rare earth minerals exists in China, according to a report by Reuters.

Of course, the United States could attempt to expand its own processing capacity of rare earth minerals, and it could conduct more mining operations domestically as well, but neither is something that could happen at any point in the near future, and both actions would likely face severe opposition from environmental groups hellbent on stopping virtually all mining operations in the United States.

China already processes five times more rare earth minerals than the rest of the world combined, so catching up prior to President Biden’s plan to scale up electric car use would be essentially impossible.

If Joe Biden and Democrats have their way, China and the Taliban will eventually be much richer and more powerful than they are today, and China’s control of America’s energy supply would expand immensely. That’s a stunning reversal from the Trump administration’s platform of prioritizing domestic energy development and limiting foreign reliance, one that would pose substantial foreign policy challenges that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.

https://redstate.com/heartlandinstitute/2021/09/22/bidens-climate-plan-would-help-make-the-taliban-china-more-powerful-than-ever-n446078

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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