President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, putting America’s near future on green energy initiatives, ignores the fact China owns the supply chain on rare-earth minerals used in batteries for those technologies, according presidential strategist Dick Morris on Newsmax TV.
“When he goes around setting up charging stations and has incentives for people to buy electric cars, we have to realize the batteries that the electric cars run on are made with rare-earth minerals,” Morris told Tuesday’s “Stinchfield.” “The United States used to be the main supplier in the world of those, but then the environmentalists got a hold of it and closed down all but 1 of our mines.
“So we now make a tiny fraction of the global supply, and China makes 80-90% of it.”
Biden seeks to take the power from the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, but it hands that wealth to China, Morris told host Grant Stinchfield.
“We’ve exchanged the Arab sheiks for the communist bureaucrats, because they will determine whether we will get rare-earth minerals, whether we can make batteries, and whether these cars can go anywhere,” Morris lamented.
“The rest of this package is just like that. He wants to transform our electric power generation into solar and wind. Well, the solar panel and the wind turbine both run on rare-earth metals. You can’t run them without that.
“So if he thinks he can have solar energy and wind energy without the rare-earth metals, Grant, he’s just tilting at windmills.”
The clean energy initiates are not without merits, Morris agreed, but technology cannot be rushed the way Biden is attempting.
“I think all of us agree that electric cars are good, that we would rather see them than internal combustion engines, and that we would rather see solar and wind than coal and oil, and maybe even than gas, but don’t put the cart before the horse – an odd metaphor for car batteries,” Morris said.
“But don’t charge ahead and prohibit the internal engine, have everybody buy electric cars, build all the charging stations, cut out fossil fuels, go to solar and wind, when you don’t have the rare-earth minerals to make the batteries and the infrastructure to build this.”
Former President Donald Trump was already on the mission to secure rare-earth mineral production again in the U.S. to get ahead of the technology transformation, Morris said.
“It was outrageous that we neutered ourselves of these,” he added. “There’s 1 little mine on the Nevada-California border that makes it, and there used to be 7 or 8 of them. We need to reopen them. Trump started that.
“Give it a very high priority. And then after we’ve done that, when we have the rare-earth minerals, then play your games with the electric cars and solar and wind.”
Important: See Newsmax TV now carried in 70 million cable homes, on DirecTV Ch. 349, Dish Network Ch. 216, Xfinity Ch. 1115, Spectrum, U-verse Ch. 1220, FiOS Ch. 615, Frontier Ch. 115, Optimum Ch. 102, Cox cable, Suddenlink Ch. 102, Mediacom Ch. 277, AT&T TV Ch 349, Sling, TVision, and Fubo or Find More Cable Systems – Click Here.
Source: Newmax
