Democrats have difficulty defining “woman” and now appear to be wobbling on defining “domestic” to include Canada. It appears easier to change definitions to fit existing laws than changing laws to meet changing policy objectives.
Canada has tons of ithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite and manganese needed to make batteries crucial to President Joe Biden’s sacred cow of clean energy. President Biden invoked the Korean War-era Defense Production Act for certain mining activities to support efforts to get needed ores.
“The President may provide appropriate incentives to develop, maintain, modernize, restore, and expand the productive capacities of domestic sources for critical components, critical technology items, materials, and industrial resources essential for the execution of the national security strategy of the United States,” states section 107 of the DPA.
The key word in the legalese underpinning the authoritarian act is domestic, which is a problem for a president resistant to allowing drilling and mining of U.S. lands and seas. His way of solving the problem is to consider expanding the definition of domestic to include Canada, according to the Politico-owner publication E&E, which focuses on energy and the environment.
The Daily Caller further reported:
Following the passage of the Democrats’ massive climate spending package, the Biden administration is looking to import critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel and may even give money to the Canadian mining industry to acquire such minerals and help push mineral supply chains out of Chinese hands, according to E&E News. Although it is desperate to produce these minerals and confront the Chinese dominance of the mineral market, the administration has blocked major mining projects in Minnesota and Alaska.
“The Department of The Interior is not for development of any kind … whether its mining or oil and gas,” Steve Milloy, a member of former President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Canada has courts and climate activists and does not the same ability to undercut China’s slave labor and therefore, the plan has serious limitations.”
The move to acquire minerals from outside the U.S. comes amid the Biden administration’s repeated efforts to prevent domestic mining developments. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced in May that it would review a proposal that dealt a significant blow to the Pebble Project, an Alaska mining project that would produce about 1.5 billion tons of critical minerals over 20 years. Additionally, Biden’s Interior Department (DOI) canceled two mineral leases belonging to the Twin Metals Mine in Minnesota in January, halting the mine’s construction.
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