In the course of hectoring the United States for its “bungled and embarrassing withdraw from Afghanistan” on Thursday, China’s state-run Global Times admitted Beijing has a rapacious interest in Afghanistan’s vast rare-earths mineral resources and snarled it was none of America’s business if China makes deals with the Taliban to get what it wants.
The Global Times accused the U.S. of profiteering from Afghanistan for the past twenty years, without offering any theories on where all the plunder might have gone, and claimed America is only worried about China going after those mineral resources because the U.S. is jealous:
Fasten your seat belts, Steve Bannon and Frank Gaffney really nail what the agenda is of the Biden Administration. Being generous, Biden may not even be aware of what he is doing to destroy this country. Nancy
VIDEO – ITS NOT A PRESIDENCY, ITS A WRECKING AGENDA
BANNON’S WAR ROOM AUGUST 4, 2021 GUEST – FRANK GAFFNEY
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas and promised to “defeat” critical race theory.
“With the help of everyone here today, we will defeat the radical left, the socialists, Marxists, and the critical race theorists,” Trump told the audience. “We will secure our borders, we will stop left-wing cancel culture, we will restore free speech and free elections and we will make America great again.”
Critical race theory (CRT) is perhaps at the forefront of America’s culture wars as parents across the country have wrangled with teachers, school boards, and teachers unions over whether it should be taught to public school students. CRT is strongly associated with the “antiracist” movement, “cancel culture,” as well as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” workforce training.
International Energy Agency report shows that green energy transition is a fantasy because of dependence on key rare minerals
A prestigious intergovernmental organization created by the world’s advanced economies is pointing out the bottleneck in the plans to substitute so-called green energy for hydrocarbon-based energy: the availability of key minerals necessary for battery storage, wind farms, solar panels, and other gizmos necessary for the switchover. Simply put: the world can’t provide the quantity of those minerals that would be necessary, and the environmental and social impact of trying to mine them in sufficient quantities would be devastating.
The cure, in other words, is worse than the disease.
The International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental organization founded by the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis to provide information and policy suggestions to help the advanced economies cope with energy needs. It currently is focused on the green energy transition so desired by many of the world’s most powerful special interests.
The report on minerals is part of a larger project on the green energy transition. Mark P. Mills cites some of its most important findings in the Wall Street Journal.
The IEA assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don’t exist. Wind, solar and battery technologies are built from an array of “energy transition minerals,” or ETMs, that must be mined and processed. The IEA finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.
Biden’s ‘infrastructure’ plan would cost $809,000 per job
By Jeffrey H. Anderson Jeffrey H. Anderson served as the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2017 to 2021 and is the co-creator of the Anderson & Hester Rankings, which were part of college football’s Bowl Championship Series from 1998 to 2014. April 22, 2021
President Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” plan is called the American Jobs Plan, but it doesn’t focus much on infrastructure and wouldn’t create many jobs. A more appropriate name for the $2.2 trillion proposal would be the “American Debt Plan.”
Former President Barack Obama’s “stimulus” bill, which Congress passed in 2009 with Biden as vice president, cost taxpayers a cool $278,000 for every new job added or saved, based on estimates from Obama’s hand-picked economists. Biden’s “infrastructure” plan might have trouble matching even that pathetic record. The plan’s overarching philosophy appears to be that the private sector doesn’t create jobs but government creates jobs.
Moody’s Analytics projects that Biden’s “infrastructure” plan would result in there being 2.7 million additional nonfarm jobs by 2030 at a total cost of $2,183,800,000,000. That works out to $809,000 per job — nearly three times as much as those under Obama’s failed “stimulus” bill. Yet Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that creating fewer than 3 million jobs at the cost of more than $2 trillion “is a great place to be.”
Perhaps Buttigieg is comparing this anemic rate of return to that of Biden’s recently passed “COVID-19 stimulus” bill, which Moody’s projects will result in about 700,000 additional jobs by 2030 at a cost, per the Congressional Budget Office, of $1.8 trillion. That’s a little over $2.5 million per job. Still, compared to anything but Biden’s wasteful COVID-19 stimulus bill, his infrastructure plan would be an appallingly inefficient job-creation program.
“Pathetic Appeal To Hysterical Media, Frightened Voters” – Aussie TV Anchor Unloads On “Loopy-Left Era Of Joe Biden”
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, APR 23, 2021 – 05:20 PM
Sky News host Chris Kenny says “welcome to the loopy-left era of Joe Biden, where climate policy is about existential alarmism” after the US had a Mexican-American teenager address world leaders during an online climate summit.
“Last night we saw yet another climate summit. Another global gathering of world leaders parading their virtue, making grand promises, playing to the green left media zeitgeist, and never being accountable for any of their promises or actions,” he said.
“And yet while the weather bureau can’t forecast 24 hours ahead, and bureaucrats can’t run a Zoom chat, these world leaders and the climate activists they pander to, tell us they do know what will happen to the climate decades from now, and even better, they know how to control it.
Even while they agree that the country that has by far the largest carbon footprint, China, can be allowed to continue to dramatically increase its emissions.”
This is a very serious issue and not enough attention has been given to this Chinese threat on our energy grid. The article is dated March 19 and I have heard nothing in the news about this threat to our energy. Nancy
Time to get serious about China’s energy blackmail
Chinese Communist Party, along with useful idiots in U.S. environmental lobby, advances strategy to project power
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARITICLE:Instead of raising alarm bells over China’s aggressive pursuit of U.S. energy resources, Washington and Texas did nothing. The buying-and-building spree by Chinese-connected wind companies continued. In 2012, 2015, 2016 and again in 2017, Chinese interests bought tens of thousands of additional acres in Texas for wind-power development. By 2019, Chinese entities owned nearly 200,000 acres in the U.S. worth $1.9 billion.
by Tom Basile • Tom Basile, host of Newsmax Television’s “America Right Now,” is an author and adjunct professor at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches earned media strategy.
March 19, 2021
Blackouts last month in Texas and parts of the Midwest should have been a snowball to the face of policymakers still complacent about the collective vulnerability of our energy infrastructure. They opted instead to debate de-icing windmills.
In its quest for global communist hegemony, China has learned from its junior partner Russia that energy blackmail works. Moscow uses the tactic to lord over Europe. Now China may be eyeing it here as well if we let them.
The U.S. must immediately ban Chinese companies or those tied to Beijing from investing in our energy markets or providing baseload power to the grid. Chinese involvement in our critical infrastructure should be regarded as no different from national security threats Huawei and the Communist regime’s Belt and Road Initiative.
In 1999, the Texas legislature passed a mandate which required the state’s utilities to get more power from renewable sources. Beijing jumped at the opportunity. Though less successful than its solar exports, Chinese wind power, backed by financing connected to the Communist regime, offered a cheaper alternative to turbines made here.
The first Chinese-developed wind-power project in the U.S. was announced in 2009. Located on 36,000 acres in West Texas — more than twice the size of Manhattan — the bold project was even slated to receive about $450 million from President Obama’s stimulus bill. Ultimately, after some controversy the project was shelved.
Executive Order: Biden signed an order on March 8, 2021 ‘Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity.’
Executive Order: Biden signed an order on March 8, 2021 establishing the White House Gender Policy Council.
Executive Order: Biden signed an order on March 7,2021 calling for federal agencies to promote voter registration.
Executive Order: On February 24, 2021 Biden signed an order repealing a series of executive orders previously signed by former President Trump on regulating the financial system, reducing poverty, deregulation, reviewing funds to cities harboring antifa, promoting beautiful architecture in federal buildings, and democratic accountability in agency rule-making.
Executive Order: Biden signed an order on February 24, 2021 to strengthen the resiliency of America’s supply chains.
Executive Order: Biden signed an order to revoke Trump’s order to expand apprenticeships in America.
| Mackubin Owens is a senior national security fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, editing its quarterly journal, Orbis , from 2008 until 2020. September 17, 2020
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:China’s vice-like grip on mineral production and processing is a case in point. In a startling May 2019 report, Foreign Policy magazine found that China “is the No. 1 producer and processor of at least ten critical minerals and metals that are essential to high-tech industries … giving China both an economic edge in the next high-tech industrial revolution and increasing geopolitical power.”
China has amassed unrivaled control of the raw materials that are the fundamental building blocks of the digital economy, our most sophisticated weapons systems, and any hope of a non-fossil-fuel energy revolution. Consider China’s dominance of the lithium-ion battery industry, the key to the production of electric vehicles. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a consultancy focused on the EV supply chain, of the 100 (and counting) battery megafactories rising across the globe, over 70 will be built in China; just five will call the U.S. home.
China is using its dominant position in the production and processing of key battery metals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite, to become the mecca for the next iteration of the global automobile industry. The potential economic and geopolitical ramifications are staggering if indeed the road to the road goes through Beijing.
It has been clear for some time that the People’s Republic of China intends to displace the United States as a hegemonic power. But Western leaders have been unwilling to recognize the failed strategy of integration and make the badly needed adjustments.
Seduced by the conceit that the fall of the Soviet Union heralded the triumph of a liberal world order of free trade and interdependence, the U.S. and other liberal countries invited China to join the World Trade Organization, believing that China would happily accept the tenets of a liberal economic order and “play by the rules” of that order.
Unfortunately, the hope that China would liberalize as it was integrated into an ever more connected world has been dashed on the rocks of geopolitical reality. Instead, Beijing has emerged as an economic and military rival while remaining unwaveringly committed to authoritarianism. And it does so all as it exploits the global system to improve its position at the expense of liberal states, most notably the U.S.
It’s not as though it’s too soon to understand China’s strategy either. China has refused to play by the economic rules, employing massive government support for Chinese firms and atrocious environmental and labor standards to upend global markets. It has pulled one key American industry and supply chain after another into its orbit, eliminating millions of U.S. jobs along the way. It is garnering the privileges of a system without practicing any of its responsibilities to the other participants of that system.
There are, finally, promising signs of change. The Trump administration has refused to acquiesce to China’s economic predation. In Congress, bipartisan support is building to stop the further erosion of critical American industries and to reinvigorate others that have been allowed to atrophy. The supply chain shock of the pandemic has served as a much-needed wake-up call. Overreliance on China and Chinese-controlled supply chains has become a major problem.
