WHILE we might despair at the hopelessness of our politicians (with the honourable exceptions of those two principled and courageous MPs Sir Christopher Chope and Andrew Bridgen) it is encouraging to see that the fight against reckless stupidity and corruption is still being energetically prosecuted on the other side of the Atlantic.
I have two videos that are an example to their lacklustre counterparts in our Houses of Parliament.
The first is of Congressman Tom McClintock, in a hearing which took place last November but which I have only just come across. It lays bare the insanity of the Democrats’ Electric Car Mandate proposal given that 80 per cent of US electricity comes from fossil fuels, plus the double insanity (or contradiction) of radically restricting the mining of copper, on which battery-run electric vehicles depend. ‘Well,’ he says like a patient parent to a child, ‘you can’t do both!’ His accusation of ‘childishness’ couldn’t be better placed or timed. His resolution, to which you can find the background here, perfectly sums up what is wrong with US mining policy.
More than that, this wonderful Congressman has provided a blueprint from which to challenge the illogic of destructive climate ideologists. (Please scroll down to the end of this article to find the transcript.)
The second video is more recent. It is of the barnstorming Republican Representative for Colorado’s Third Congressional District, Lauren Boebert. A couple of weeks ago at a House Oversight Committee she assailed ex-Twitter executives over their relationship with the FBI and her own ‘shadowban’. For those of you not yet aware of her, she is a force to be reckoned with. Demonised by the left for her guns rights advocacy, she co-sponsored four Bills to ‘End the Covid Pandemic’ which were passed by the House. ‘Covid is over – even Joe Biden admitted it,’ she said. ‘It is far past time to start undoing the harm that Covid hysteria caused our country, and it starts by reinstating our healthcare workers who should never have been fired for refusing to take the vaccine, requiring federal employees to actually show up to work, and cutting wasteful Covid spending.’
In this video she begins with a statement about Twitter’s constant and pervasive contact with the FBI, which made it little less than an FBI subsidiary, as reported by Matt Taibbi. She asks an uncomfortable Yoel Roth, former TwitterHead of Safety, how many meetings he had with the FBI and whether he personally authorised the ‘shadowbanning’ of her account. Ms Boebert is no shrinking violet: a woman after my own heart. You can watch her in action here, pulling no punches.
SHOW
Congressman Tom McClintock transcript
Mr Chairman, I simply want to implore you and your Democratic colleagues to reconsider the policies that you’ve been pursuing. On the one hand, you want to mandate not only electric cars, but industrial scale backup batteries for wind and solar farms, all in the name of saving the planet. Yet, on the other hand, you want to radically restrict mining, also in the name of saving the planet.
Well, you can’t do both.
You’ve been moderately successful at mandating electric cars. California bureaucrats have just imposed such a mandate on Californians over the next decade. About 3 per cent of vehicle sales are now electric. So congratulations – only 97 per cent more to go. And we don’t need to get into a discussion today about where you think the electricity for your electric cars is going to come from. About 80 per cent of our electricity still comes from the very fossil fuels that you’re waging war against, and you’re creating devastating shortages by doing that. We’ll save that for another day.
But let’s just look at the mining requirements.
In order to meet your electric car mandates, specifically a six-fold increase in demand over the next decade, we’re going to need 384 additional graphite, lithium, nickel and cobalt mines by 2035, according to industry forecasts. Expensive recycling mandates will only reduce this number to 336 new mines that we’re going to need. In fact, according to the International Energy Agency, an electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a comparable internal combustion vehicle, six times the mining to produce a comparable car.
And of course, copper is a critical component in this technology. And copper is what you’re trying to shut down in the matter before us today. If it is your contention that the mining required to produce electric cars is a threat to the environment, then you were also admitting that the electric cars that require it are a threat to the environment. Can’t you see how foolish and self-destructive and absurdly contradictory these policies have become?
And can’t you see, yet, the damage that you’re doing not only to the environment but to people’s lives?
As you make it harder and harder to mine the components to meet your mandates, the expense of those materials rises dramatically.
We’re already seeing that at the gas pump and in our utility bills. And it’s not just electricity. It’s everything these minerals could be used for if they were more efficiently applied. When something is scarce, it becomes expensive. You’re making all of the things that we depend upon for our quality of life more scarce and therefore more expensive. You’re fixated on a one degree rise in global temperatures over the next century. But you couldn’t care less that you’re making it financially impossible for many people to heat their homes in sub-freezing winters. Europe is now reverting to burning wood to survive this winter.
This is not going to end well for humanity, and it’s not going to end well for your party as more and more people connect the dots between your policies and the conditions that they’re now suffering.
You need to stop this.
The resolution before us will at least shed some light on the inexplicably absurd decision that your administration made to unilaterally thwart a bipartisan legislative act and to impede one of the most important copper mines in America. And frankly, you need this information more than we do, because maybe it will dissuade you from continuing with the childish fantasies and the self-destructive policies that you are going to be held accountable for, both by voters and by history. I yield back.
