IN-DEPTH: Biden’s Green Energy Plan Draws Fire as China’s Mineral Dominance Looms

President Joe Biden speaks during a virtual Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) at the South Court Auditorium at Eisenhower Executive Office Building June 17, 2022 in Washington. Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Biden administration has defended its alternative energy push as a way to counter the Chinese regime’s dominance in critical minerals but critics say the president’s own policies are undermining the U.S. pursuit of energy independence.

Recent weeks have shown President Biden attempting to galvanize international cooperation and protect domestic energy producers as part of a strategy that will purportedly “de-risk” the U.S. relationship with China. As his advisor John Podesta noted, the United States is “in a vulnerable position” given China’s wealth of resources. According to a June report from Nikkei Asia, the International Energy Agency (IEA) is looking to address that vulnerability by issuing guidelines that would purportedly help nations avoid reliance on China for renewables.

At home, the Biden administration has attempted to compete with China through dramatic investments in energy infrastructure and goals like aiming for half of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030. It’s unclear, however, whether those strategies will be enough to challenge the Chinese regime’s overwhelming dominance in the processing, mining, and utilization of critical minerals that play a vital role in, for example, supplying the clean energy agenda with key technology.

“We’re not doing anything to help ourselves,” former Trump White House advisor Steve Milloy told The Epoch Times. “Everything we’re doing is making the situation worse.” He said that the current wave of green regulations was “making ourselves cripplingly dependent on China,” and that Biden’s “crazy” electric vehicle (EV) goals were impossible without Chinese resources.

A worker’s reflection on a mirror framing a lithium-ion battery production line at a plant in Huzhou, China, owned by Microvast Holdings, whose Texas-based subsidiary qualified to negotiate for a $200 million U.S. Department of Energy grant to build lithium batteries in the U.S. Stringer/Reuters

The New York Times recently asked whether the world can “make an electric car battery without China” while outlining the disproportionate share of the necessary resources and processing capabilities for many minerals listed as “critical” by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2022. It isn’t just the ingredients either: China dominates the final products as well with 54 percent of electric cars made in the country and 66 percent of the batteries.

It’s already rapidly outpacing the United States in a “clean energy” arms race with a booming EV market set to see 6 million in vehicle sales. The China Passenger Car Association reported 486,000 units of new-EV deliveries in July. That’s 26.7 percent of the new auto market, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the United States is expected to see 1 million new EV sales, accounting for just 8.4 percent of the market.

The Biden administration nevertheless appears confident in its push for clean energy. His energy department recently asserted that the administration’s investments would spur job growth, power 10 million EVs, and fuel “[o]ver 160 new or expanded minerals, materials processing and manufacturing facilities.” Biden has also pushed subsidies and tax credits to address EV affordability. But It’s unclear how much the public will cooperate as an Associated Press poll from April showed that just 4 in 10 adults said they were somewhat likely to purchase an EV for their next car.

Milloy and Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of conservative think tank Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment also warned about potential political difficulty in getting mining projects approved.

“We do not have the authoritarian regime that China does to force states and local governments to have mines in places they do not want to have it,” Furchtgott-Roth told The Epoch Times. She also argued that “China doesn’t have the environmental concerns that we have. That’s another reason why we’re making China stronger by transferring our energy-intensive manufacturing over to China.”

Legislators similarly worried about Chinese industrial power while pushing a bipartisan attempt to reinstate tariffs on the solar industry. Biden, however, vetoed the bill, saying U.S producers couldn’t afford more uncertainty. “When it comes to solar, since I took office, 51 new and expanded solar equipment manufacturing plants have been announced, and America is now on track to increase domestic solar panel manufacturing capacity eight-fold,” he said.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Biden administration for comment.

An aerial view of the coal fired power plant on Nov. 11, 2021 in Hanchuan, Hubei province, China.Getty Images

The Cost of Going Green

The Chinese regime’s pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 has placed it among other international powers declaring bold climate ambitions. Its own behavior, though, has raised doubts about its interest and ability to implement a climate-conscious agenda.

The IEA recently posted projections showing China leading clean energy development with 55 percent of the world’s capacity by 2024. And yet, it was expected to also see a record high in coal production last year. At a global level, nations are similarly expected to see alternative energy investments outpace those in fossil fuels, although the world’s consumption was expected to hit a record high in 2022.

It’s possible one could feed the other as China’s dramatic transition to EVs will require additional coal-generated power, according to an ANZ Group analysis reported by Bloomberg. It’s unclear how successful the EV transition will be but it’s expected to cut emissions substantially by replacing conventional gas guzzlers. What is clear is that even amid ambitious climate reforms like Biden’s, the United Nations (U.N.) doesn’t think the world is acting quickly enough. In the years since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the U.N. has issued report after report warning that the world was behind in achieving emissions reductions.

According to critics, Paris and other efforts are doomed to fail while inflicting serious financial harm. Their comments come as the United States has once again been forced into raising the ceiling for debt that’s substantially in the hands of the Chinese regime. The most recent debt ceiling deal narrowed environmental reviews for the permitting process. It’s unclear, however, whether it’s enough to build the type of infrastructure needed for freeing the nation strategically and financially from the regime’s dominance.

Members of Congress have weighed options like renewables and nuclear. But scholars like Benjamin Zycher, an economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, argue that the United States should pursue its oil and natural gas resources, which Democrats have resisted over environmental concerns.

While the administration has touted purported economic benefits of “green” transitions, it’s also suggested economic impacts are secondary by framing climate as an “existential” issue that should be addressed through tools like Paris.

More recently, the administration has been selling leases in the Gulf reportedly as part of stipulations in his Inflation Reduction Act. It’s difficult to calculate just how oil and gas exploration would play out in the current economy, but studies have indicated different outcomes on this issue. The American Petroleum Institute, an interest group for oil and natural gas, commissioned a study that projected $149.2 billion in GDP growth over 20 years from allowing access to the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The Heritage Foundation has attempted to gauge the environmental and economic impacts of ambitious energy reforms and found a trade-off of dismal emissions changes for financial devastation. More specifically, it plugged a carbon tax into a model based on the Energy Information Administration’s own and found it would shed millions of jobs alongside $7.7 trillion in lost GDP over 18 years. It also found that even if the United States were to eliminate all its emissions, it would only mitigate global temperatures by less than 0.2 degrees by 2100. Only a mitigation of 0.5 degrees Celsius would result if all OECD economies eliminated their greenhouse gas emissions as well.

Published last year, that study based its scenarios on whether the United States would re-enter the Paris Agreement, which has added to a broader international environment pressuring world economies to drastically reform for the climate’s sake.

“This whole effort at central planning for energy and transportation [and] the power grid is doomed to failure,” Zycher told The Epoch Times. “The only question is how economically destructive it will be and the answer is it won’t be trivial.”