How Democrats’ Push For Electric Cars Endangers National SecurityDemocrats’ highly expensive environmental policies have been developed without any meaningful strategic thinking or analyses about raw materials and geopolitics.BY: PAUL GILBERT
APRIL 28, 2023
Ford Motor Company recently announced it’s set to lose more than $6 billion on its latest electric vehicle plants while it gets them running, with the company CEO saying “we cannot continue to import batteries and rare earth from overseas.”
“We can build all the plants, but what’s the good if we’re importing batteries?” he continued, highlighting U.S. mine closures and global shortages of the rare earths required for the batteries that power these cars.
Joe Biden declared war on fossil fuels on his first day in office. The federal government has adopted numerous policies to swiftly move our nation away from gas-powered vehicles to all-electric ones.
Yet the Biden administration appears entirely unaware of the hard realities of such a major infrastructure shift. In a recent congressional hearing, Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland couldn’t answer basic questions about the dearth of crucial materials for EVs due to foreign monopolies on mining and the administration’s antipathy to U.S. energy independence.
https://twitter.com/mattdizwhitlock/status/1640738719102631936* * *
China Monopolizes Key Inputs for EV BatteriesEV batteries require nine elements, here listed in order of proportion: graphite, aluminum, nickel, copper, steel, manganese, cobalt, lithium, and iron. Almost all of these elements that will be needed in massive quantities to produce a U.S. electric-vehicle boom are controlled by foreign countries, especially the top U.S. adversary, China. Mining is a major business operation that requires years to develop, at high business risk, and the United States controls few of the needed raw materials for EVs.
China mines and refines 82 percent of the world’s graphite. It also consumes one-third of the graphite extracted by the world’s next largest supplier, Madagascar. There has been no graphite mining in the United States since the 1950s, and plans for opening any mine are far off.
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