Hillary and her half billion solar panels: Where will they come from?
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/301844-hillary-and-her-half-billion-solar-panels-where-willOctober 19, 2016
During the 2016 Presidential debates, one of the most important issues raised has been energy and natural resources policy. Unfortunately, the candidates’ respective positions have been virtually unchallenged by the mainstream post-debate media coverage and by the online “fact-checkers.” In particular, Hillary Clinton says that a key foundation of her energy policy as President would be to deploy “half a billion solar panels” across America.
Hillary Clinton pledges half a billion solar panels for US if she wins office
https://t.co/9wRF74OCxn— UpsolarGroup (@UpsolarGroup) September 27, 2016
Ours is a country where the Wall Street Journal reports it takes more than eight years to permit a single new mine, and with solar panels being made of copper, zinc, indium, gallium and numerous other “rare earth” metals, where the heck will the materials to make these solar panels be mined, and where will they be built?
China, that’s where. Over 90 percent of the world’s rare earth metal production comes from China. The same China where the New York Times reports that more than half of the rare earth metals they mine for things like solar panels are produced at “rogue, gangster mines” with little or no environmental regulation, and often devastating ground water pollution. This domination of rare earth metal global markets is one of the reasons that China is also the single largest global producer of solar panels.
At a time when Clinton says we should be tough on China, her half a billion solar panel plan would do just the opposite. Absent significant changes in our permitting process, her solar panel plan would actually take hundreds of billions of dollars out of the U.S. economy and give it to China — a place where the mining, refining and manufacturing of solar panels is done at much lower standards than we have right here in the U.S.
We should all be asking both candidates for more specifics. In the case of solar panels, where will the metals for these solar panels be mined from and where should they be manufactured? Do we want to increase production of copper, zinc and rare earth metals here in the U.S.? If so, how can we do that in a country where it takes those eight plus years to permit a new mine?
If either candidate wins two terms, their eight years in office will be over before many new mines will even be permitted in the U.S. to produce the metals for these solar panels without significant changes to our decision-making process....
