Hey, remember when Democrats passed the wrongly named Inflation Reduction Act, with all its climate doom bits and bots, some of which yammered about manufacturing components in America? Things like batteries, requiring American mined materials in order to qualify for tax rebates? And all the solar panels and wind turbines? And how I and other Skeptics said that both Biden and enviroweenies would look to shut down any attempted mining?
Biden admin issues 20-year mining ban as it turns to foreign supply chain amid green energy push
The Biden administration on Thursday announced that it would complete a 20-year withdrawal of 225,504 acres in a northern Minnesota forest area that is home to some of the largest domestic critical mineral reserves.
The action announced by the Department of the Interior (DOI) effectively prohibits mining activity from taking place in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Duluth, Minnesota, and surrounding area for the next two decades. The agency said it took the action in an effort to protect the local environment and watershed, which environmentalists worried would be contaminated by mining activity.
“The Department of the Interior takes seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans. Protecting a place like Boundary Waters is key to supporting the health of the watershed and its surrounding wildlife, upholding our Tribal trust and treaty responsibilities, and boosting the local recreation economy,” DOI Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
It is rather interesting that all these climate cultists keep admitting that the environment gets damaged in order to produce EVs, eh? It’s also a hell of a thing that the federal government can keep clamping down on things that happen on state property. Or what should be state property.
Last year, the DOI canceled two mineral leases held by the firm Twin Metals Minnesota, which had been located in the Superior National Forest located outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. As a result of that decision and the action Thursday, domestic mining companies will effectively be banned from operating in the region for the foreseeable future and the forest’s vast critical mineral resources will be left untapped.
However, Twin Metals’ mining project contained about 88% of the nation’s cobalt reserves in addition to vast copper, nickel and platinum-group elements. Such critical minerals are vital for various green energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries, battery storage facilities, solar panels and wind turbines, which the Biden administration has aggressively pushed.
It might take a Republican president to make this happen. Again, I’m not against EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, etc, I’m against citizens being forced into them along with replacing affordable, dependable “dirty” energy with unreliable, expensive “green” energy.
The State Department recently signed an agreement that opens the door to financing mining projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which mined more than 70% of the global supply of cobalt in 2021 and is home to 3.5 million metric tons of cobalt reserves. But independent investigations conducted in recent years have found that cobalt mines in the DRC employ child laborers.
The Biden admin’s cool with environmental damage (and child labor, some of it forced) in 3rd world shitholes like DRC.
“It’s difficult to square the announcement of this significant land withdrawal with the Biden administration’s stated goals on electrification, the energy transition and supply chain security,” said National Mining Association President and CEO Rich Nolan in a statement. “At a time when demand for minerals such as copper, nickel and cobalt are skyrocketing for use in electric vehicles and solar and wind infrastructure, the administration is withdrawing hundreds of thousands of acres of land that could provide U.S. manufacturers with plentiful sources of these same minerals.”
Yeah, well, I told you this would happen. Not that it was all that difficult to predict.
For anyone who hasn’t figured this out let me clue you in.
The push for EV’s is not to REPLACE gas/diesel vehicles.
It’s too ELIMINATE ALL vehicles. The criminals in power don’t
want you owning a gas/diesel vehicle. They ALSO don’t want
you to own an ELECTRIC vehicle. They want you WITHOUT a
privately owned vehicle so you are totally dependent on
public transportation. Kind of hard to keep a society under
your thumb when citizens can come and go anytime, anywhere
whenever they want. They plan to END that.
Yes Fan it is all so true and frightening ! What few understand is that this is all being done by the shoe making/cobbler cartel. They want to eliminate all wheeled vehicles and make people walk everywhere.
Obama loaning GM. 34 billions to Dave the US auto industry was just a Kabuki smokescreen
Teach that mine is not “necessary”
EVs will continue to be built without it. And even the future need of cobalt is becoming less critical for batteries as technogy evolves.
It is fear mongering to say that mine is necessary. Just as it was to tell us that Germans would freeze without Russian fossil fuels.
Stop trying to frighten children about the future.
Is anyone surprised that the Biden Administration wants to protect the land in lily-white northern Minnesota, and buy the materials for batteries which is being mined in nearly all-black nations in sub-Saharan Africa?
That, at least, is how the left would put it, had this decision been taken under President Trump.
Regardless of what amount of cobalt mining the US adds to the global commodity, most cobalt will still come from DRC. Yes, those hated US mining regulations keep mining corporations from using child labor, but the answer may be to work with the mining companies to encourage them to enforce standards.
The distinguished Mr Dowd mad me laugh:
You do realize that the mining companies in the Congo don’t care about our regulations, and don’t care about whether there are 12-year-olds working in the mines; they only care about getting product out of the ground and into the market. And the kids are showing up for those jobs because their families and they are dirt poor, and will always be dirt poor.
To H.
How much of the money that Obozo the SCOAMF loaned to GM came back as “campaign contributions” and other pocket lining graft……