Coal mining

Give a country rare earth elements and it’ll have fighter jets, missiles and warships for a day. Force a country to extract and process its own rare earth elements and it’ll be safe from relying on countries run by unstable dictators forever.  Such is President Trump’s sensible line of thinking as he keeps up America's trade war with China. As China imposed export licensing restrictions on seven rare earth elements, or REEs, last week, Trump signed an Executive Order “launching an investigation into the national security risks posed by US reliance on imported processed critical minerals and their derivative products.” The administration is now pursuing a deal to procure REEs from Ukraine.

The Environmental Protection Agency has just released its most aggressive emissions rules to date. The rules demand that coal and gas plants capture almost all of their emissions. In essence, fossil fuel plants will have to cut their emissions by 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 or shut down. Unless, of course, they can afford to run carbon capture systems or swap out natural gas for hydrogen. But is that even realistic? “By requiring carbon capture or hydrogen burning, two technologies that haven’t even had multiple successful demonstration projects, let alone mature supply chains, the Biden administration is essentially signing a death warrant for fossil fuel plants,” Isaac Orr, an energy analyst at the Center for the American Experiment, said in an email.