Washington, DC’s energy colonialism

DC’s climate virtue signaling will hammer DC residents – and neighboring states even more

Paul Driessen

Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser thinks people worldwide have a “human right” to come to the United States, legally or illegally. Our nation’s capital proudly proclaimed itself a “sanctuary city” in 2016. “We celebrate our diversity and respect all DC residents,” the mayor said, “no matter their immigration status.”

But when Arizona and Texas were overwhelmed by a million-plus illegal migrants – and their governors sent a couple thousand of them to Washington – she was outraged.

They have “overwhelmed” our public services, she complained. The sanctuary city faces “an emergency,” a “humanitarian crisis.” DC taxpayers “should not be picking up the tab” for housing and feeding these once-celebrated immigrants. We need National Guard troops to help cope, she pleaded – twice.

Her city of 707,000 people, 10,000 city government employees and a proposed FY2023budget of $19.5 billion cannot cope with a few thousand migrants? But little border towns should happily accommodate the tsunami of illegals Mr. Biden has allowed to cross our southern border?

Chickens coming home to roost can be painful. But the real problem is the (willful) inability of progressive politicians and activists to foresee even easily foreseeable consequences of their decisions – and then demand that scapegoats pay to fix the problems the progressives caused.

The District of Columbia is about to inflict an enormous new set of roosting-chicken realities on its residents – and even more on its neighbors: Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

Led by Councilwoman Mary Cheh, DC’s City Council recently passed two laws banning fossil fuels for heating, cooking, and city-owned vehicles. Together, they position their city as a top virtue signaler on manmade climate change, which Ms. Cheh calls “the single most important environmental issue of our time.” Mayor Bowser enthusiastically endorsed the efforts.

The “Clean Energy DC Building Code Amendment Act” prohibits fossil fuels for home and water heating in new commercial buildings (including residential buildings four stories and higher), starting in 2027. It also requires that restaurants and families cook with electricity instead of natural gas. Only buildings deemed “essential to protecting public health and safety” may use gas for backup electricity generation.

The “Climate Commitment Act” forbids fossil fuel heat for new district-owned buildings, including schools, by 2025. It requires that all DC vehicles be “zero-emission” by 2026; all District operations be “carbon-free” by 2040; and the entire city be “carbon-neutral” by 2045.

Every successive fossil fuel reduction will require expanded electricity use – and generation. With DC-based nuclear almost certainly a nonstarter, power generation will presumably be via “renewable energy,” mostly wind and solar. But these technologies are intermittent, unreliable and weather-dependent. They must be backed up by batteries that must be recharged constantly, by more wind and solar power.

Let me say it yet again. Wind and sunshine are renewable and sustainable. However, the materials needed to harness this energy to power modern civilization absolutely are not. This DC Green New Deal alone would require millions of tons of metals, minerals, concrete and plastics; billions of tons of ores, and hundreds of new mines and factories – in the United States, China, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. 

With China, India and other countries burning more fossil fuels to improve people’s living standards – and supply all those “green energy” needs – global greenhouse gas emissions will continue rising. Even assuming fossil fuel emissions actually do drive climate change, DC’s “historic” laws might therefore reduce average global temperatures by 0.0002 degrees by 2100.

Washington already imports 100% of its electricity from neighboring states. So can virtue-signaling DC government officials answer just a few of many fundamental questions?

Exactly how many wind turbines, solar panels and backup-power battery modules will DC need by 2025, 2026, 2040 and 2045, as your electricity requirements skyrocket? (Please factor in the size and type of “renewable” energy equipment you plan to install each year – and how many hours per day, week and year the sun will shine and wind will blow in the decades after the systems are installed.)

Exactly how many tons of lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, copper, iron, magnesium, aluminum, concrete, petroleum, fiberglass, and other metals, minerals and materials will be needed to manufacture all these turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, transformers, and electric vehicles and appliances?

Exactly how much coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power will be required to operate all those mostly overseas mines, processing facilities and factories? How much carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, and toxic air and water pollutants will they emit?

Will DC require “responsible sourcing” for the massive amounts of metals and minerals needed to honor its “climate commitment” – regardless of how this will increase your costs? Will you demand more mines and quarries in the United States – and opening more US onshore and offshore areas to mineral exploration – so that America is not more dependent on China, child and slave labor, and environmental desecration in foreign lands, for your “green energy” raw materials?

Where exactly do you intend to locate the hundreds of wind turbines and millions of solar panels this “transition” will require? On DC city rooftops? In Rock Creek Park and the Potomac River?

Or do you plan to install them in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean – and connect them to DC with hundreds of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines through your neighbors’ back yards? Don’t their scenic areas, habitats and wildlife have value?

Where do you plan to warehouse your electric vehicles and a half-million half-ton battery modules for just one week of backup power? Those batteries pose significant fire hazards, and therefore must be located far from residences, offices, garages and parking lots. Electric cars and buses must be parked far from buildings and one another, to avoid chemical-fueled infernos. 

Will the federal government also have to get by on this zero-carbon energy? What happens when electricity generation doesn’t meet DC needs, and inevitable blackouts hit? Whose electricity gets cut off first? Ms. Cheh, Mayor Bowser, Greenies, President Biden, Democrats and Deep State bureaucrats? 

We assume you think DC taxpayers should not be expected to “pick up the tab” for trying to “save the planet” from “climate cataclysms.” But why should your neighbors be forced to pick up the tab for your meaningless zero-emission virtue-signaling? Why should the rest of the world do so?

What “say” will residents of these states have in these decisions – especially those who’ll be expected to live next to vast wind and solar “farms,” and suffer the infrasound, light flicker and other tranquility-disrupting and health-impairing effects of your “clean, renewable” energy facilities in their backyards?

How will you respond when Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland vote or sue to reject DC’s energy imperialist facilities – or when some really upset citizens engage in “mostly peaceful” protests in downtown DC, the way Antifa types rejected fracking, pipelines, mining, inequality and police brutality?

One has to wonder whether DC’s real objective is sustainability, sustained moralizing – or energy colonialism and totalitarian control over people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards. Why doesn’t DC just buy carbon credits and pretend it’s becoming a virtuous shade of green, the way Al Gore does?

In any event, not many DC neighbors are excited about becoming energy colonies for our nation’s capital, as it asserts itself as an arbiter of climate, energy, environmental, social and government ethics.

For that matter, we’re definitely not thrilled about Democrat and Biden Administration actions on these issues. Maybe they can start answering these same questions – on statewide and national scales, where the amounts of “clean, green, renewable” energy installations, raw materials, mining, manufacturing, pollution, and slave and child labor are truly monumental and mind-boggling.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow ( www.CFACT.org ) and author of books and articles on energy, environmental and human rights issues. He lives in Virginia.

Our next energy and security crisis?

Importing 65% of US oil in 2005 vs 100% of many key minerals now (from China and Russia)

Paul Driessen

Oil and natural gas aren’t just fuels. They supply building blocks for pharmaceuticals; plastics in vehicle bodies, athletic helmets, and numerous other products; and complex composites in solar panels and wind turbine blades and nacelles. The USA was importing 65% of its petroleum in 2005, creating serious national security concerns. But fracking helped cut imports to 40% and the US now exports oil and gas.

Today’s vital raw materials foundation also includes exotic minerals like gallium, germanium, rare earth elements and platinum group metals. For the USA, they are “critical” because they are required in thousands of applications; they become “strategic” when we don’t produce them in the United States.

They are essential for computers, medical imaging and diagnostic devices, night vision goggles, GPS and communication systems, television display panels, smart phones, jet engines, light-emitting diodes, refinery catalysts and catalytic converters, wind turbines, solar panels, long-life batteries and countless other applications. In 1954, the USA imported 100% of just eight vital minerals; in 1984, only eleven.

Today, in this technology-dominated world, the United States imports up to 100% of 35 far more critical materials. Twenty of them come 100% from China, others from Russia, and others indirectly from places where child labor, worker safety, human rights and environmental standards are nonexistent.

The situation is untenable and unsustainable. Literally every sector of the US economy, the nation’s defense, its energy and employment base, its living standards – all are dependent on sources, supply chains and transportation routes that are vulnerable to disruption under multiple scenarios.

Recognizing this, President Trump recently issued an executive order stating that federal policies would henceforth focus on reducing these vulnerabilities, in part by requiring that government agencies coordinate in publishing an updated analysis of critical nonfuel minerals; ensuring that the private sector have electronic access to up-to-date information on potential US and other alternative sources; and finding safe and environmentally sound ways to find, mine, reprocess and recycle critical minerals – emphasizing sources that are less likely to come from unfriendly nations, less likely to face disruption.

The order also requires that agencies prepare a detailed report on long-term strategies for reducing US reliance on critical minerals, assessing recycling and reprocessing progress, creating accessible maps of potentially mineralized areas, supporting private sector mineral exploration, and streamlining regulatory and permitting processes for finding, producing and processing domestic sources of these minerals.

Incredibly, the last report on critical minerals and availability issues was written in 1973, the year the first mobile telephone call was made. That inexcusable 45 years of neglect by multiple administrations and congresses dates back to the era of “revolutionary” Selectric typewriters and includes the appearance of desktop computers in 1975 and the first PC in 1981. (That PC had a whopping 16 KB of memory!)

As former geologist, Navy SEAL and military commander – and now Secretary of the Interior – Ryan Zinke has observed, allowing our nation to become so heavily “reliant on foreign nations, including our competitors and adversaries,” for so many strategic minerals “is deeply troubling.”

It’s actually far worse than “troubling” or “neglectful.” It involved a concerted, irresponsible, ill-considered effort to place hundreds of millions of acres in wilderness, wilderness study and other highly restrictive land use categories – often with the very deliberate intention of making their mineral prospects off limits, before anyone could assess the areas’ critical, strategic and other mineral potential.

The 1964 Wilderness Act had contemplated the preservation of a few million or tens of millions of acres of wild and primitive areas and natural habitats. To ensure informed land use decisions and access to vital mineral resources, Congress included “special provisions” that allowed prospecting and other activities in potential and designated wilderness areas – and required surveys by the US Geological Survey “on a planned, recurring basis,” to gather information about mineral or other resources – if such activities are carried out “in a manner compatible with the preservation of the wilderness environment.”

In 1978, while hiking with him, I asked then Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rupert Cutler how he could defend ignoring this clear statutory language and prohibiting all prospecting, surveys and other assessment work in wilderness and study areas. “I don’t think Congress should have enacted those provisions,” he replied, “so I’m not going to follow them.”

As of 1994, when geologist Courtland Lee and I prepared a detailed analysis, areas equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined (427 million acres) were off limits to mineral exploration and development. The situation is far worse today – and because of processes unleashed by plate tectonic, volcanic and other geologic forces, these mountain, desert and other lands contain some of the most highly mineralized rock formations in North America, or even the entire world.

The deck was stacked: for wilderness, and against minerals and national security. This must not continue.

These areas must be surveyed and explored by government agencies and private sector companies. The needs of current and future generations are at stake. Failure to conduct systematic evaluations violates the most fundamental principles of national defense, national security and responsible government.

The Departments of Agriculture and the Interior should follow the special provisions of the Wilderness Act; abolish, modify or grant exceptions to existing motorized access restrictions; and ensure that areas are evaluated using airborne magnetic and other analytical equipment, assay gear carried in backpacks, truck-mounted and helicopter-borne drilling and coring rigs, and other sophisticated modern technologies.

This approach also complies with environmental and sustainability principles. It ensures that we can get vital strategic minerals from world class deposits on small tracts of land, instead of having to mine and process vast quantities of low quality ores. That protects most of our wild, scenic and wildlife areas – and modern techniques can then restore affected areas to natural conditions and high quality habitats.

Even ardent environmentalists should support this, because the renewable energy, high-tech future they want and promise depends on these minerals. For example, generating all US electricity (3.5 billion megawatt hours per year) from wind would require some 14 million 1.8 MW turbines, requiring some 8 billion tons of steel alloys and concrete, 2 million tons of neodymium, other rare earths, and vast amounts of cobalt, molybdenum and other minerals. Substituting photovoltaic solar panels for turbines would require arsenic, boron, cadmium, gallium, indium, molybdenum, selenium, silver, tellurium and titanium.

Backing up that electricity for seven windless or sunless days would require 700 million 100kw Tesla battery packs – and thus millions of tons of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel and cadmium.

Every generation of renewable energy, computer, communication and other high-tech equipment requires new materials in new quantities – and thus renewed exploration, mining and processing.

The United States is the only country that locks up its strategic mineral resources. No sane, responsible nation risks or forecloses its energy, technology, economic, employment, defense and sustainable future. So it will be fascinating to see which legislators, judges and pressure groups vilify the activities proposed in the Trump executive order, government minerals report and this article.

Those that try to block progress in these areas should be named and shamed (along with their financial supporters) – and their actions made key issues in election campaigns and social responsibility discussions. Perhaps they should be the first to get shut off from electricity, cars, computers, cell phones, medical care, social media and other modern benefits that depend on petroleum and critical minerals.

Let the Interior Department know your views on these vital issues. And maybe take a page from the Cutler-illegal immigrants playbook: Become a sanctuary county or state, simply ignore troublesome laws, regulations and court dictates – and just initiate your own exploration and mining programs.  

Paul Driessen is policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of articles and books on natural resource issues. He has degrees in geology, ecology and environmental law.