Just as President Joe Biden has issued an executive order geared at making half of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. electric by 2030, China is poised to buy access to Afghanistan’s massive supply of rare earth minerals used to manufacture electric car batteries from the newly empowered Taliban.
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Beijing officials were said to be ready to fly to Afghanistan for negotiations as soon as the chaotic — and deadly — withdrawal of American and NATO forces was complete.
“Chinese dealmakers have their bags packed and will arrive on the first flights after the airports open,” Byron King, a geologist writer on mining and energy for Agora Financial, told MarketWatch earlier this month.
The now-deposed government of Afghanistan had estimated that their lithium deposits could be worth as much as $3 trillion, while the U.S. Geological Survey projects this figure to be $1 trillion, according to Just the News.
Although some small-scale mining projects were established in Afghanistan prior to the Taliban’s recent takeover, China, which has already signaled a willingness to recognize the terror group diplomatically, will now be able to work with them to establish “more systemic exploitation” of the country’s mineral resources as it has done in Africa, the outlet noted.
With an aggressive agenda to increase the production of electric vehicles coinciding with potentially trillions of dollars’ worth of lithium now in the hands of a diplomatically alienated government willing to work with our top trade adversary, America First politicians are raising the alarm.
“Right now, we have oil, gas, we’ve got gas, diesel, and you can choose to have an electric vehicle, which I’m not against, but the government making it by law that you can’t drive a gas or diesel truck … and you’re forcing America to rely on China,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., told Just the News.
“China dominates right now 80% of the rare earth mines all over the world,” she explained. “And they dominate the battery market by 75%. And now China is moving in rapidly. And they’ve already been negotiating this deal with the Taliban for a long time. They want the mining rights to over 1 trillion dollars [worth] of rare earth minerals in Afghanistan.”
While there has long been enthusiastic bipartisan support for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, there is no doubt that the manner in which the pullout was conducted this month has been the subject of much outrage and criticism.
It is inexplicable that so much of our military gear ended up in the hands of the Taliban, that our government appeared more interested in adhering to the demands of the Taliban rather than NATO allies’ insistence that we remain beyond the Aug. 31 deadline to recover our people from the destabilized nation, and that now that the withdrawal is complete hundreds of Americans remain, alone, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Must we also consider that the Taliban could soon be amassing wealth for itself with the aid of communist China with the lithium needed to manufacture “green” vehicles the U.S. federal government is essentially trying to force American companies to produce and American consumers to purchase?
Two morally depraved entities — the Sharia-compliant Taliban and the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist CCP — stand to gain considerably from the embrace and exercise of this dubious green agenda, which, we are so often informed, is predicated on the superior morals of idealistic and uncompromising environmentalists.
Compare the carbon emissions that the push for electric vehicles is aimed at reducing to the atrocities committed by the Taliban against women and girls under radical Islamic law or the CCP’s genocidal mistreatment of religious minorities and sadistic control of its own citizens under its Orwellian suppression of civil liberties.
To what end are we saving the planet if we are empowering people who are so willing to destroy the image bearers of the One who created this planet?
