All by design, explicitly.
"Six Chinese mines, understood in 2009 to be critical to U.S. national security, producing essential materials needed for technology applications ranging from aluminum and steel production, uranium processing, EV batteries and flat-panel displays to aerospace and missile guidance systems, infrared imaging, fiber optics, lasers, advanced airframes, body armor and armor plate. In short, just about every major U.S. advanced manufacturing sector as well as 21stCentury weapons platforms.....
The U.S. remains 100% dependent for fluorspar, graphite and rare earths. China remains the world’s top supplier. And while the dependency has eased a bit for germanium, tin and tungsten, the U.S. remains more than 50% import dependent for each, while China’s role as global provider stands unchanged.
And this, despite the fact that the U.S. hosts known resources for all six, but simply fails to make mining, refining and recovering them a policy priority....
In any case, the warning could hardly be more clear. The U.S. has a choice: It can take immediate steps to reduce its dangerous dependency on a Chinese supply chain for critical technology metals. Or we can hope COVID 2.0 will not disrupt supply in a second global shut-down – or that Beijing won’t one day decide to curtail access to these critical materials in time of crisis."
“Fauci: ‘No doubt’ Trump will face surprise infectious disease outbreak
January 11, 2017
“
“But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming?”
Anyone who didn’t think there would be another virus out of Wuhan is an idiot that deserves the virus themselves for the sake of cleaning up the gene pool. No lab, genetic engineering or anything besides classic bureaucratic ass-covering (plus people eating bats, dogs, etc) needed.
If a person doesn’t wish to be second-guessed and held responsible for everything that they ‘should’ have seen coming then they should stay the hell out of any sort of leadership position. If you want the glory, the money, and/or the fame then you are also going to get the blame when things go wrong.
President, CEO, Prime minister, you can’t claim credit for a good economy without taking the blame when things go south, you can’t claim the victories without also being held to account for the defeats.
Germany and Japan learned what it meant to be dependent upon others for raw materials the hard way in WWII.
Nothing will happen to fix the problem until we euthanize all the treehuggers, so that we can mine our resources without interference.
Fabulous nuggets in here - names lab that has sent out WuFlu tests preset for positive+ results...
All by design, explicitly.
Unless Congress castrates the EPA, you will not see any mines opening in the United States. Which gets to another point; follow the money for these environmental groups. They have armies of lobbyists and lawyers whose only goal is to end US industrial capacity. Those lobbyist/lawyers are very well paid. Grandma sends them a $10 check because she saw the photo of a sad polar bear on their ad in Good Housekeeping. You think that's enough money to pay all those people? Next question; who benefits from the destruction of US industrial capacity?
Follow the environmental money. I guarantee it goes back to the PRC.
Director Peter Navarro has been warning about this, since Day 1 of this China Flu.
He promotes bringing back our manufacturing and reducing/eliminating our dependency on the ChiComs (my word, not his).
Meanwhile, the Dems go out of their evil way to PROMOTE and PROTECT the ChiComs.
On April 22nd 2020, MP Minerals was awarded a DOD contract that will rapidly expand production of rare earth minerals in the U.S.
President Trump,through the DOD and EPA, has made production of this class of materials a national security priority.
The Mountain Pass Mine was once the world leader in rare earth production. After many years as an EPA Superfund site, it has been reclaimed, new technology employed and in production.
This contract just announced is only Phase 1 in the drive to make the US self-reliant for the vital minerals.
Tip of the iceberg...
Monday morning quarterbacks typically go undefeated, yet never wear the rings. When this is all over, we should have a way to pick the all stars.
Criteria (for all star selection): must have absolutely, incontrovertible BS that Trump shoulda, coulda, hadtohave seen all this coming and stopped it in its tracks.
No doubt there will Pulitzers awarded to best Monday morning reporter who will hang Trump’s hide to the wall for having been willfully blind and irresponsible to his duty to protect the nation. The reporter, no doubt, will be able to “prove”, according to Monday morning quarterback criteria, that Trump is a buffoon, and a dangerous idiot, and that the nation is doomed if Trump is reelected.
Good piece that we should all think about and our nation should correct.
Here is another one for the list -
Electrical power grid components and appliances such as large transformers....
These are all made in China. The biggest transformers in our grid take months to obtain and we have very few spares on hand.
While many frame this argument in terms of an EMP attack on our nation and its infrastructure, the same effect or even worse can occur from a solar storm.
In other words, there is a slight chance that our electrical distribution network could be knocked out. We do not have the spares on hand to quickly repair the grid and we would be solely dependent on China in the first few months of such a disaster. If we could not repair the switching yards for the large transmission lines the rest of the system is useless.
Imagine a world with no electricity for months.... everything would stop, food would spoil, no internet, no phone, etc.
This is another area we need to address with domestic manufacturing and preparation (i.e. - lots of spares on hand). Just talk to any electrical engineer with a major utility and they will tell you this is a real problem.
We can, and we have to, devise, design and engineer products that do not have rare earth dependencies, and perform as well as those that do. That is nearly all that places like Los Alamos ought to be doing.
RED SWAN: The Story of a Secret Cable and the Crisis We Could Have Seen Coming
Posted by GeoPolicy on April 24, 2020 8:33 am
Tags: china, Covid-19, critical minerals, strategic resources, supply chains
Categories: Geopolicy
By Daniel McGroarty, TES GeoPolicy Editor
COVID-19: It’s all we talk about, on the cable news, and in our 6-foot socially-distanced prison walks around our silent neighborhoods. And in nearly every conversation comes the intellectual shrug, “who could have seen this coming?” A single phrase that neatly absolves governments and experts alike of any responsibility of predicting the pandemic and, if not being able to stop it, at least cushioning its blow. We even have a name for it (credit Nassim Nicholas Taleb): A Black Swan – the quintessential case of something never seen before.
Except for the fact that some of us did see this coming, whether it’s Bill Gates in his 2015 TED talk, or the unnamed author of the 2008 U.S. Government Intelligence Report envisioning the World of 2025, which includes a section called “Potential Emergence of a Global Pandemic”: “If a pandemic disease emerges, it probably will first occur in an area marked by high population density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and Southeast Asia, where human populations live in close proximity to livestock.”
So if Black Swan is a misnomer, what is it that’s got us locked in our homes, wearing gloves and masks? Call it a Red Swan, given COVID’s point of origin, whether it seeped out on the sleeve of a lab tech at the Wuhan Virology Lab or jumped to a human host off a butcher’s hook at the Wuhan wet market.
But is it unfair to engage in so much 20-20 hindsight? After all, who could see COVID coming?
Well, we did. We — as in nodes within the U.S. Government tasked with tracking critical infrastructure on a global scale, literally maintaining a list of critical materials and capabilities, wherever they may be around the globe.
How do we know? It’s an interesting story, with a classified document and a cloak-and-dagger tale of how it came to light. It starts with Julian Assange, the famed Wikileaker. In early 2010, his motives nefarious and his means indiscriminate, he spilled out a torrent of U.S. Government diplomatic cables – ultimately 251,000 in all.
Among the documents, a cable sent by the U.S. State Department, providing a fleeting inside-look at something called the “Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative.”
While the document’s State Department senders designated the cable “SECRET/NOFORN” (no foreign nationals) and marked it for de-classification in 2019. Wikileaks made it public a decade ahead of schedule, revealing an intriguing list of “Critical Infrastructure/Key Resources” outside of the U.S. “whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the United States.”
What’s on the no-longer-Secret U.S. Government list?
Under the heading for China: “Polypropylene Filter Material for N-95 Masks”
…Precisely the ones the federal government and states are scrambling to source right now. That’s right: The U.S. Government knew in 2009 that N-95 masks were critical, came from China… And did nothing about it.
But there’s more – and it goes to the broader supply-chain dependence on China that has only deepened in the past decade. The classified list includes a series of Chinese mines deemed critical:
“Fluorspar Mine
Germanium Mine
Graphite Mine
Rare Earth Minerals/Elements
Tin Mine and Plant
Tungsten – Mine and Plant”
Six Chinese mines, understood in 2009 to be critical to U.S. national security, producing essential materials needed for technology applications ranging from aluminum and steel production, uranium processing, EV batteries and flat-panel displays to aerospace and missile guidance systems, infrared imaging, fiber optics, lasers, advanced airframes, body armor and armor plate. In short, just about every major U.S. advanced manufacturing sector as well as 21stCentury weapons platforms.
Why would Chinese production of these six materials be a matter of U.S. national security?
Because at the time, for these six materials the U.S. was 100% import-dependent – producing precisely zero – for fluorspar, graphite and rare earths, 90% dependent for germanium, 80% for tin and 63% for tungsten. In the cases of fluorspar, graphite, rare earths and tungsten, China was the world’s leading producer, and was a Top 3 producer for germanium and tin.
And today, 10 years after that highly-classified warning?
The U.S. remains 100% dependent for fluorspar, graphite and rare earths. China remains the world’s top supplier. And while the dependency has eased a bit for germanium, tin and tungsten, the U.S. remains more than 50% import dependent for each, while China’s role as global provider stands unchanged.
And this, despite the fact that the U.S. hosts known resources for all six, but simply fails to make mining, refining and recovering them a policy priority.
As a warning unheeded, the cable makes for interesting reading in light of today’s COVID pandemic – and as U.S. policymakers embark on a rolling series of multi-trillion dollar spending bills, the next of which will include infrastructure projects.
At issue is not just one but three layers of risk: Maybe the metals and minerals produced by the Chinese mines will be withheld in time of conflict, as Beijing seeks to leverage access for American concessions. Maybe the metals and minerals will soon be prioritized for internal Chinese consumption, under its Made in China 2025 program to drive Chinese technology dominance, with little left for export to the U.S. or elsewhere.
Or maybe – as the leaked cable presciently notes – the Chinese mines will be disrupted by a pandemic, slamming on the supply chain brakes for a U.S. economy dependent on critical materials that go from arriving “just in time” to “not at all.”
In any case, the warning could hardly be more clear. The U.S. has a choice: It can take immediate steps to reduce its dangerous dependency on a Chinese supply chain for critical technology metals. Or we can hope COVID 2.0 will not disrupt supply in a second global shut-down – or that Beijing won’t one day decide to curtail access to these critical materials in time of crisis.
But here’s one thing we can no longer do: If an act of nature or of man cuts off U.S. access to vital technology materials, we can’t claim to be surprised by the appearance of a Red Swan. We’ve seen it coming.
Daniel McGroarty, TES GeoPolicy editor, served in senior positions in the White House and Department of Defense, and has testified in the U.S. Senate and House on critical minerals issues. McGroarty is principal of Washington, D.C.-based Carmot Strategic Group, and president of the American Resources Policy Network, a non-partisan virtual think tank dedicated to informing the public on the importance of developing U.S. metal and mineral resources. The views expressed here are his own.
China will buy out mining lands of a bankrupt America selling out federal land, just as the French were being snookered in selling major government airports and rail lines to CHina...
Cross border nationalization globalization.
Bttt.
5.56mm
Sure, after the fact we know we have to on-shore all critical supply chain elements. But how was that inobvious to the smart money in January???
personally I am tired that none of our news presents this as an attack on the world, china didn’t care if they killed a million of their own to get deniability as to the attack it has begun on the world, and like Islam if we cannot say these bastards released this on us, I’ve heard terms so they could level the playing field, my butt, so they could win the war..we live in ostrich land, I say do no more business with them and prepare for war, or just hit them..its going there anyway..
Bkmrk
The U.S. remains 100% dependent for fluorspar, graphite and rare earths. China remains the world’s top supplier. And while the dependency has eased a bit for germanium, tin and tungsten, the U.S. remains more than 50% import dependent for each, while China’s role as global provider stands unchanged."BeijingAnd this, despite the fact that the U.S. hosts known resources for all six, but simply fails to make mining, refining and recovering them a policy priority....
In any case, the warning could hardly be more clear. The U.S. has a choice: It can take immediate steps to reduce its dangerous dependency on a Chinese supply chain for critical technology metals.
Or we can hope COVID 2.0 will not disrupt supply in a second global shut-down – or that Beijing won’t one day decide to curtail access to these critical materials in time of crisis."
We are in that crisis now and China is doing just that.
If we cannot mine the material we need on our land, we must get them from friendly countries that have them.
I push comes to shove, we must go into China and commandeer what ever we need.
And we need to keep our knowledge that if China sends us any PPE at all that it may be defective or corrupted with a Chinese virus, if not the present Wuhan virus, but a different one.
China had more viruses than the Codid-19 in labs including the one in Wuhan.
The threats from China are the most dangerous we have ever encountered.