De todo un poco!
The Biden administration announced on Tuesday actions taken by the federal government and private industry that it says will bolster the supply chain of rare earths and other critical minerals used in technologies from household appliances and electronics to defense systems. They say these steps will reduce the nation’s dependence on China, a major producer of these elements. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
The Biden administration announced actions taken by the federal government and private industry that it says will bolster the supply chain for rare earths and other critical minerals used in technologies from household appliances and electronics to defense systems. They say these steps will reduce the nation’s dependence on China, a major producer of these elements.
“China controls most of the global market in these minerals,” President Joe Biden said Tuesday from the White House. “We can’t build a future that’s made in America if we ourselves are dependent on China for the materials that power the products of today and tomorrow.”
The steps include a $35 million contract to MP Materials to process heavy rare earth elements at the company’s Mountain Pass, California, production site — the first processing and separation facility of its kind in the United States.
In 2020, the government awarded $9.6 million to the company, which owns the only American rare earths mine. The $35 million announcement Tuesday will complement the $700 million that MP Materials will invest by 2024 to create an American rare earth magnetics supply, said company CEO James Litinsky, who spoke virtually at the White House event.
Last June, following an executive order from Biden, the administration released a report on the supply chain, concluding an over-reliance on China for critical minerals. Currently, China controls 87% of the global permanent magnet market, as well as 55% of rare earths mining capacity and 85% of its refining.
What Beijing is holding right now is critical, said Phoebe Moon, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine, focusing on global supply chains and economic statecraft.
“We are using more hydro energy. We are using more climate and environmentally friendly energy sources,” Moon told VOA. “And the list of rare earth materials that the Biden administration announced that they will be targeting on this issue really has that in its heart.”
Rare earths
Rare earths are 17 minerals that are not rare, just difficult and costly to mine and process cleanly. The U.S. is the second-biggest miner of rare earths, after China, according to the latest government data. Other top miners include Myanmar, Australia, Madagascar, India, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil.
The administration’s goal is to become reasonably self-sufficient for some key essential industries such as auto and network equipment for national security and competitiveness, said Jen-Yi Chen, associate professor of operations and supply chain management at Cleveland State University.
“By ‘reasonably,’ I mean not 100% ending our dependence on the Chinese, since it would be too costly and not sustainable, as we are not that resource-rich and thus need to prioritize and focus on the real essentials,” Chen told VOA. “By and large, in the near future, we may still need the Chinese inputs and capacity to keep prices low for the nonessentials but should not compromise much on the essentials.”
Chen said ramping up domestic production, despite its environmental costs, still makes sense.
“In case of a shutdown in operations, the time to recover will be much shorter than going to partners, especially during the pandemic,” Chen added. It may also motivate better environmental oversight as “they are now right in our backyard.”
Chinese pressure
Earlier this week Beijing announced sanctions aimed to restrict access to rare earth minerals to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, two companies that provide maintenance services to Taiwan’s missile defense systems. Beijing considers Taiwan its breakaway province.
Last month, legislators introduced a bipartisan bill in the U.S. Senate that could prohibit defense contractors from procuring rare earths from China by 2026 and force the Pentagon to create a strategic reserve of those minerals by 2025.
“The Chinese Communist Party has a chokehold on global rare earth element supplies, which are used in everything from batteries to fighter jets. Ending America’s dependence on the CCP for extraction and processing of these elements is critical to winning the strategic competition against China and protecting our national security,” said Republican Senator Tom Cotton, one of the bill’s sponsors.
Moon said recognizing the importance of critical minerals supply chains is a great start, but there must also be fundamental, cooperative efforts to keep geopolitics stable.
“The problems we face today cannot be solved by ourselves in many cases, and these efforts to reshore and ally-shore will create an echo chamber and undermine our efforts to understand each other, creating peace in a more fundamental way,” she said, referring to efforts to move production domestically or to friendly countries.
Also at the White House event on Tuesday, Berkshire Hathaway Energy Renewables announced it is setting up a facility to test the commercial viability to extract lithium from geothermal brines at Imperial County, California, an area that contains some of the largest deposits of lithium in the world.
Other steps the White House announced include partnerships with Ford and Volvo for the collection and recycling of end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, a $140 million pilot project to recover rare earth elements and critical minerals from mine waste, and a $3 billion investment in refining and recycling battery materials.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday welcomed U.S. plans to deploy more troops to Europe and said NATO is considering sending additional battle groups to the southeastern part of its alliance amid tensions along the Russia-Ukraine border.
Stoltenberg told reporters that while NATO is preparing for the possibility that Russia may take military action, NATO remains ready to engage in “meaningful dialogue” and find a diplomatic resolution to the crisis.
“NATO continues to call on Russia to deescalate. Any further Russian aggression would have severe consequences and carry a heavy price,” he said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday that the U.S. deployment is heightening tensions in the region.
The United States and other Western allies have been preparing economic sanctions to level against Russia in hopes of persuading Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull back the more than 100,000 troops Russia has near the border. Russia has denied it plans to invade Ukraine.
Stoltenberg said Thursday there has been a “significant movement of Russian military forces into Belarus,” Ukraine’s northern neighbor where Russia is set to take part in joint military drills this month.
“This is the biggest Russian deployment there since the Cold War,” Stoltenberg said.
Russia has demanded NATO pull back troops and weapons deployed in eastern European member countries, and to make clear that Ukraine cannot join the 30-member military alliance.
NATO and Ukraine have rejected those demands, saying countries are free to pick their allies.
But Stoltenberg said Thursday that NATO is ready to talk to Russia about relations between the two sides, and about risk reduction, increased transparency and arms control.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is meeting Thursday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the latest in a series of visits to Kyiv by world leaders and diplomats to show support for Ukraine and try to advance a peaceful resolution to the crisis.
Erdogan has suggested Turkey, a NATO member that also has good relations with Russia, could act as a mediator.
Talks Wednesday between Putin and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson did not provide any breakthroughs. French President Emmanuel Macron was expected to have a phone conversation with Putin later Thursday.
Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden discussed the Russia-Ukraine situation in a call Wednesday, with the White House saying the two leaders reviewed diplomatic efforts and “preparations to impose swift and severe economic costs on Russia should it further invade Ukraine.”
The Norwegian Rights Council also warned Thursday about the effects on those living in eastern Ukraine if the crisis escalates.
After years of violence in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where Ukrainian forces have been battling Russia-backed separatists, the aid organization said the humanitarian needs are already high with nearly 3 million people relying on aid.
Increased fighting “would devastate already damaged civil infrastructure, further restrict peoples’ movements, block access to communities in need, and disrupt essential public services such as water, power, transport and banking,” the NRC said in a statement.
The U.S. said Wednesday it is dispatching 2,000 more troops to Europe, most of them to Poland, and moving 1,000 troops from Germany to Romania to bolster NATO’s eastern flank countries.
The additional U.S. troops, part of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, are “not going to fight in Ukraine” in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. Rather, he said, they are intended as an “unmistakable signal that we stand with NATO.”
Kirby said the new deployment is not permanent, but that the U.S. could dispatch more troops as warranted. Kirby said the deployment is separate from the 8,500 U.S. troops placed on heightened alert last week for possible dispatch to Europe.
The Defense Department spokesperson said the U.S. still does not believe Putin has “made a decision on invading Ukraine.”
But Kirby said the Russian leader is “showing no signs of being willing to de-escalate” and has continued to add troops in Russian-aligned Belarus to Ukraine’s north and along Russia’s border with eastern Ukraine.
Kirby said the U.S. is “prepared for a range of contingencies” involving Putin’s actions toward Ukraine. The spokesman said the new deployment is “not the sum total of the deterrence.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba addressed the conflict in a broader context at a news conference Wednesday, saying, “I’m confident that Russia’s war on Ukraine and wider Europe will ultimately end when two fundamental issues are resolved. First, the West should turn from reactive to proactive strategies when dealing with Russia.”
He added, “Ambiguity on Ukraine’s role as an indivisible part of the West has to be put to an end. The Ukrainian people chose this course and defended it at a high price.”
“We are historically, politically and culturally a part of the West,” Kuleba said. “It is time to end harmful ambiguity which serves as a temptation for the Kremlin to continue its attempts to undermine Ukraine or reverse its course against the will of the Ukrainian people.”
Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
Copyright © 2009 jalexiscv
Design by Design Disease for Smashing Magazine | Blogger Templates by Blog and Web