On this week’s episode of She Thinks, Daniel Turner joins to discuss how the Biden administration’s green agenda is making America dependent on China. We focus on how the push to electrify our homes, vehicles, and many other areas of our lives is leading to China’s increasing dominance on the world stage. We also explore how China controls a large market share of the necessary minerals to build the renewable infrastructure while the Biden administration continues to restrict domestic oil production and mineral extraction—all of which is jeopardizing our national security.
Daniel Turner is the Founder and Executive Director of Power The Future, where he advocates for rural energy communities in the power center of Washington, DC. He is an expert in energy and environmental issues, and he’s a regular on Fox News and Fox Business, and has appeared on over 1,000 radio shows.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode we’re focusing on how the Biden Administration’s green agenda is making America dependent on China. We’re going to get into the specifics of how the push to electrify our homes, vehicles, and many other areas of our lives is giving China strong dominance, which in turn jeopardizes our national security. And we have a wonderful guest to break it all down. Daniel Turner joins us. He is the founder and executive director of Power The Future, where he advocates for rural energy communities and the power center of Washington DC. He is an expert in energy and environmental issues, and he’s a regular on Fox News, Fox Business and has appeared on over 1000 radio programs. Daniel, it’s a pleasure to have you back on She Thinks.
Daniel Turner:
Beverly, it’s great to be with you. Thank you so much.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I want to let people know what we’re going to be discussing today is a new report that you have out, they can find it at powerthefuture.com. It’s called, Where Green Meets Red, How the Environmental Agenda is Making America Dependent on China. All the areas we’re going to discuss are going to be in that report if people want to go find it there. But I thought we would start with just a broad question. This report is based on the fact that there is this green agenda. There is this fear-mongering going on. And the question is, should we fear climate change more than we fear China?
Daniel Turner:
No, not remotely. And the climate change fear-mongering we’ve been hearing about for quite some time. I hate to divulge my age, but I’ll be 50 next year. I’m not exactly a kid. My entire life I’ve heard of this and you see UN reports dating back… And they’re the ones we make fun of, the reports from the seventies that talk about global cooling and how the ice age is coming. But there are reports back from my high school years in the eighties and nineties where they said The Maldives would be underwater by the year 2000. The oceans would rise six feet by the year 2000, the Arctic wouldn’t have ice.
And we’ve just heard this fear-mongering before, and even if this time is right, I’ve never seen a UN scientist and we have asked, I’ve never seen them correct their work from the past. I’ve never seen them say, “What did you get wrong last time? Why were your numbers so wrong in 1990 but this time, they’re so right?” No one ever seems to answer that. The climate fear, even if you are very concerned about climate change, and a lot of people are, the threat from China is much more immediate and much graver.
Beverly Hallberg:
And one of the things I think is interesting is when you do have these predictions like the world’s going to end in 12 years, the person who makes that prediction doesn’t seem to live their life any differently as if the world is actually going to end. Do these people ever have to come back on the record and say, “Hey, I was wrong. It’s now going to be in another 20 years,” or whatever other prediction they want to make? Why don’t we go back to them and get them to try to correct the record?
Daniel Turner:
It’s a great question and it’s something I would like to ask these folks if there was ever the chance to have an honest conversation. And it’s why I love platforms like yours, because people can disagree and they can watch it and they can contact me and ask their questions, and I have a lot of back and forths. But it seems like the leaders of this movement, the ones who really push the agenda, you’re right, they never seem to have to go back and clarify their report. Most famously, is Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. None of those predictions have come true. And that was a while ago now when you think about it. We’re going on 20 years since that was made. 20 years isn’t a blip of an eye and especially in DC years, 20 years is millennia. DC years are like dog years.
And none of his predictions have come true. Where was the mistake? We’re talking about data sets. We’re talking about computer models that are quantifying data sets and speculating and generating speculation reports into the future. What computer data set was wrong? What was incorrect that now we have to believe you? And the first thing you said, I agree with a hundred percent in your private life, if you don’t live any of this, I got a real problem with that. Yes, it’s a lack of honesty and it’s a sign of hypocrisy, but I’m not trying to stop someone from smoking. But if I’m going to lead a charge to say, “No smoking,” but I’m lighting up, there’s something about that. And these people are leading a charge saying, “No gas stoves, no gas cars,” but then they’re living a lifestyle that is so robust in fossil fuels that I don’t know, just something’s wrong with that picture.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I think most people see that. They see the hypocrisy. A lot of people, I think rightly assume this is about control in a certain aspect, but there are a lot of repercussions for the types of policies and executive orders that this administration is putting through. I want us to go to the connection with China. How does what we do here in the US different energy policies that often Congress doesn’t even vote on, they’re just pushed through the EPA, through the administrative framework, how does China relate? Why is there a concern that our agenda makes China stronger?
Daniel Turner:
And that’s why we wanted to put this report out for the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, which after it was passed suddenly was renamed as the largest investment in climate in history. And it wasn’t couched at that at the beginning. We were told it was going to offset inflation or reduce it, but after the fact that we found out this was a big spending bill, and that’s why we wanted to put this report out to say, again, agnostic of climate change, agnostic of UNIPCC reports or any of these computer models, if this is the policy prescription, then let’s just deductive reasoning walk through the results.
And for example, if we’re going to be spending close to a trillion dollars on investing in wind and solar, where are wind and solar made? Where are EVs made? Who controls the markets, not just of the manufacturing side, but the raw material side? And both of them are very important. The Biden Administration talks about how we’re creating green jobs. But in a really simple analogy, I liken it to buying an Ikea desk. You assemble it there, you get all the little screws and the widgets.
Beverly Hallberg:
We try to.
Daniel Turner:
Or try or lose your hair trying to do it, but you really can’t say that desk was made in your living room. The product, the raw materials, the pieces come from a foreign country. You assembled it there. We are assembling wind turbines and we’re assembling solar panels, but the real beneficiary of these hundreds of billions of dollars of investment are the places where they’re made and they’re made predominantly in China.
Beverly Hallberg:
And can you take me through that processing of energy minerals that are needed for this type of infrastructure? This gets pretty technical, but why is China the place to do this? Is it just what they have as far as on the land and the minerals that they have, is it just the land is well suited for this?
Daniel Turner:
No, it’s the lack of regulation and the lack of human rights and the lack of healthcare. It’s very simple reason why we have shored a lot of our jobs even to our southern neighbor in Mexico. I saw a report just the other day. Someone was saying how well we manufacture, “Ford is moving this plant to manufacture these EVs in Mexico because their plants run efficiently.” And I thought, “That’s a way to phrase it,” but if you don’t have to give maternity leave or paternity leave, or you don’t have to give healthcare and you don’t have to have sexual awareness, diversity training, and you don’t have to have OSHA come inspect it and all these little things, and I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m just saying all these things add to the cost. They make products expensive. It’s expensive to work in America.
And of course they move the manufacturing to China because there is no EPA testing your groundwater and shutting you down. There are no protestors. We have environmental protestors here at every single site, whether it’s nuclear, oil, gas, coal, pipeline. People are paid to protest. There are no protesters in China, and they know there won’t be protesters because they’d get arrested. It’s really cheap to make things in China, but not for good reasons. And you would think as an American conscious would say, “We should really not be doing things in a place that is okay with nine year old girls without hard hats or protective equipment working in a coal mine.” That’s not something to pat ourselves on the back and say, “Look how cheap solar panels are.” They’re cheap, but they’re cheap for a reason. And that reason’s really, really bad. It’s really shameful.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I’ve thought about just this idea of we need to be safe for our environment, be good stewards of the environment. It’s a global issue. It’s not just the United States and what happens over the ozone layer in the United States, it’s what happens all over the world. Would the Biden Administration say that China, who we’re offshoring all this to them, do they treat their environment well, which in turns impacts us? This is where I feel like the conversation is lacking. If the United States is environmentally conscious, why don’t we start mining these resources here?
Daniel Turner:
I love the phrase that you just said, “We’re lacking the conversation,” because it’s so much nicer than what I would want to say but we are lacking this conversation. We do talk about it as a global climate crisis. When you look at emissions worldwide, the United States and the EU combined times it by two, those are China’s emissions. China really is the world’s largest emissions polluter by far, by magnitudes they are. The main reason why is of course they don’t have any environmental practices. They also burn coal and they don’t burn coal like we do in the United States. They burn coal very dirty. But why do they burn coal? Because coal works. There is no wind turbine factory that runs on wind turbines. There’s no solar panel factory that runs on solar. They run on coal. And not just because of productivity levels and because of efficiency levels, but also because of heat levels.
To make a solar panel great, simplest example, they’re not glass. People say they’re glass, they’re not. They’re crystalline quartzite. You have to mine the quartz, you have to smash it down with huge machines, and then you have to smelt it and heat it to around 2,500 degrees. Coal burns that hot. You can burn coal in China to make solar panels, to make electricity in Wisconsin, but you can’t burn coal in Wisconsin to make electricity. There’s a disconnect logically there. As you said, lacking a conversation, that’s just a very simple question I have. Why can you burn coal in China badly but we can’t burn coal in America if it’s a global problem? And when you ask those questions, the response is, “Climate change. Climate change is a serious threat and we have to tackle the crisis,” and it becomes a tautology.
Beverly Hallberg:
Let’s talk about what the potential implications of this could mean as China is the place where we outsource all of, not all, but a lot of our energy to. When we do that, they then get more power over us because when we need energy, the country we’re turning to, how much of the United States market share do they have as far as outsourcing this? And what does that mean if we ever get into some type of conflict with them, what would that mean to our grid?
Daniel Turner:
Those are the scary questions. And I wish we had this conversation. I wish policy leaders would have this conversation more seriously and would tackle it. China manufacturers right now, between 70 to 75% of the green technologies, be it wind, solar, EVs, batteries, 70 to 75%. But more threatening than that is the raw materials, especially the rare earth elements that are made into these technologies. They control 90 to 95% globally. Most of our cobalt and cobalt is found in any lithium ion battery. The batteries, they always tell you on the plane, “Make sure you don’t have them if you’re checking your luggage,” that requires a lot of cobalt. Most of the cobalt comes from The Congo. China controls those mines. They use Congolese slave labor to get them to the surface, but they are mines that are controlled by Congo, by China, excuse me. We need an awful lot of copper.
Every EV has 60 to 80 pounds of copper. Buses have hundreds of pounds of copper. A lot of our copper comes from Chile, but the mines are owned by China. Chileans are working, but China controls them. And the administration, especially Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of The Energy, talks a lot about we have to unshackle ourselves from OPEC for oil. And I agree, I don’t want to be beholden to OPEC, but if we’re giving up OPEC to be under the thumb of China, that’s not a really good trade-off, not for long-term prognostics, because China is not our friend. Proof of that, what’s going on at the UN right now, is Xi Jinping there? Nope. Why? Because he doesn’t need to be. He’s not threatened by Joe Biden. He’s not threatened by UN world order. He just foregoes it. China is not our friend. And why would we want to give them so much control over something so vital? Which is power.
Beverly Hallberg:
And it also makes you wonder about Taiwan. Of course, there’s a lot of concerns if China is going to invade Taiwan or at least put some type of more pressure on Taiwan, it changes our leverage, doesn’t it? When we are beholden to China in this area.
Daniel Turner:
And remember back in the COVID days when the scare really started taking off and there was the need for personal protection equipment, PPE, and people realized, “A lot of this comes from China. A lot of our medical supplies are made in China.” And what did China do? They said very bluntly, “Let’s renegotiate our trade. Let’s renegotiate some tariffs,” that then the Trump administration had on them. China didn’t stand up and say, “Holy cow, there’s this terrible COVID scare. America needs PPE.” They used it as an opportunity to benefit their own nation. What’s going to happen if we electrify a larger percentage of our grid? And we do have storms, hurricane, tornadoes, mother nature, just hail, a good hailstorm will destroy an entire solar field. We need to replace them. Is China going to race to our aid to say, “Oh boy, they need solar panels. Let’s get them there ASAP boys.” Or, is China going to say, “You need solar panels. Let’s talk. Let’s talk about some other issues that would help us as a nation.”
Again, I fight with this sometimes with our libertarian friends who are hardcore, “Free markets have to reign.” And I agree, but free markets have to reign when we have good operators and good actors, and China’s not a good actor. I’m worried about saying, “It’s no different. They make it in China, they make it in Jersey. It’s all the same.” It’s not, not when you have a country who is a communist country that has world global domination as their goal, they’re not a good actor on the world stage.
Beverly Hallberg:
And potentially could be doing business with some of our leaders here that we don’t know all the details about it. And I bring that up because you mentioned something really interesting in your report, and you talked about the Chinese spy balloon. Of course that made tons of news coverage. Remember the Super Bowl last February, early February is when it hit big. You have a theory as to what potentially they were doing, what were they spying on, and then why you think Biden let it fly over the whole country, what is your theory on that?
Daniel Turner:
And in particular, there’s one company, I just want to mention this also, that’s getting a 200 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Act to make batteries. And we know that company has as on its lobbyists, its DC personnel, some of the very same firms that are connected to the president’s son. And it’s just curious that they’re getting a $200 million loan. That’s troubling. The Communist Chinese Party doesn’t need to get a $200 million loan for a battery company, but I just wanted to throw that out there as well. And the spy balloon is very disconcerting because whether it was military tactics, most people think, I tend to think, that they were looking at sites for wind and solar. They want to know where our wind and solar we’re putting up because again, we’re pushing very aggressively to build wind and solar.
These farms are huge, thousands of acres. And a solar farm is five, 6,000 acres. Wind farms are a hundred thousand acres in Texas, they’re easy to spot by air. And are they looking to see vulnerabilities? Are they looking to see where we’re putting their technology and what are they looking for now that they know this information? Again, going back to my cheek of our libertarian friends who say, “Free markets have to reign.” They have to reign when we have a good actor, but I don’t remember the Canadians ever lobbying a spy balloon over to see where our maple syrup farms are. That’s a concern.
Beverly Hallberg:
Let’s take it now to more the kitchen table side of this, things that people see that would impact them personally and that’s the talk about getting rid of gas power stoves. I actually just had one installed in my house. I love it immensely. I love gas stoves and also this push for EVs, electric vehicles. And there was a huge PR disaster with Secretary Granholm a couple of weeks ago, week to two weeks ago, when she went on to go on this road trip with EVs. And it was a disaster for many reasons. There was a lot of news coverage on that because it’s not something that is easy.
It’s not something where you can find the stations to power up very easily. They don’t always work well. And I’ll even say this, I’ve thought about this from a female perspective. Let’s say it does take 20 minutes to power your car. What if it’s dark? What about in the winter? People know that it’s going to take you a while. I even think of that safety concern if it takes a long time to power your car. These issues where it’s really hitting people right where they can see it and the vehicles and the stoves that they use, how likely is it that people are going to be forced to get rid of their gas stoves and be forced, I know that there’s a timeframe on the EVs, but be forced to get an electric vehicle?
Daniel Turner:
I think it’s very likely under this current administration, I don’t see a lot of pushback from the Congress on this. I know The House has drafted some legislation. Ted Cruz had a Protect our Stoves Act, co-sponsored with Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, but obviously Senator Schumer held it, it hasn’t gone anywhere. And even if it did, President Biden would probably veto it. The courts are the best way to stop a lot of this because it is happening through executive fiat. And I don’t believe that the agencies are this all powerful. A lot of the push for banning these products, I think is the backend of going after the fossil fuel industry. On the front end, we heard a lot about the ESG movement, punishing banks for lending, the Federal Reserve threatened the Treasury Department, “If you lend or you have too many fossil fuel clients on your balance sheet, we’re going to lend you money, but at a higher base point.”
It became risky to lend to the fossil fuel industry. On the front end, they were going after financing the fossil fuels. This is the backend. Let’s get rid of the products that use fossil fuels. And if in the middle you can sandwich the fossil fuel industry, and it’s really how they’re trying to eliminate it. But there is a lot of personal choice in that. I don’t have a problem with EV. I do have a problem with EVs, but I’m not trying to stop anyone from having one. But I do have a problem with saying, “No, this is such a good product that we will mandate that you use it and we will get rid of the alternative.” That’s troubling. The free market has never forced people to get a smartphone or the internet. It’s never forced people to buy products before.
And when the markets are allowed to operate, those products flourish and they improve and they become cheaper. Now you’ve got the government forcing us and by eliminating our competition. Your concern about EVs charging are serious. And there’s a lot of other concerns, especially about electric stoves. What happens when you lose power? You know I live on a farm here in Virginia. We have lost power before where my stove and my hot water heaters still work. And that’s a blessing because I can take a hot shower, I can still cook dinner even though I’m in the dark. That’s a miracle of the fossil fuel industry. Or not a miracle. It’s a pro of the fossil fuel industry. A negative is if you lose power and all you have is electric appliances, you’re in bad shape. That’s just a reality. And no amount of goodwill or climate change fear is going to change that reality anytime soon.
Beverly Hallberg:
I think so much of this is also about the risk assessment and the trade-offs people are willing to make. I think people want to be good stewards of the environment, but when they’re told that you have to pay X amount, it’s going to be inconvenient, road trips are going to be impossible, but you have to live that way because it’s better for the environment. I think a lot of people view life should be worth living and should be enjoyable. And many of these rules are trying to make life almost impossible to live.
Daniel Turner:
And it is a very misanthropic philosophy. It is a nihilistic philosophy. There’s a lot of fear that we’re all going to die. Everything stinks. The planet’s crumbling. Life is miserable. Just earlier I heard the Vice President, Kamala Harris, talking again about her conversations with young people and how they’re afraid to have families because of climate anxiety. And boy, what a horrible way to see the world. What a horrible way to see children. What a horrible way to see the future. There isn’t an optimism here. And even if you are concerned about climate, is there no hope that we can overcome anything? Are you that down? And I’m not even trying to be like rah, rah America, but just humanity writ large, do you really think that, A, humans are powerful enough to destroy the earth? And B, do you really think that humanity can’t come up with a solution?
The solution has to be punitive. It has to be suffering. The example you mentioned of Secretary Granholm, and I think it’s important to point out, she did have a staffer sit in a charging station because they waited for her to arrive and they wanted the photo op and you know political advanced work, I do, if this is your job, you do everything necessary in advance to have the photo op go well. But a mom with a screaming baby said, “I need to charge my car.” And they would not move. We actually, FOIA the 9-1-1 call of the mom saying, “I need to charge my car, and this person won’t get out of the spot. And they don’t even have an EV.” We found out the hard way that it’s not illegal to block a charging station with a gas powered car. It’s maybe immoral, but it’s not illegal.
But the reason why I say that story, who suffered? Not Jennifer Granholm, the mom and the baby, and no one offered her an apology, no one went to them and said, “I’m sorry your schedule doesn’t matter, ma’am.” As a mom, I’m sure she didn’t have a set schedule for the day of things she had to do right with her baby on her hip. “Your schedule doesn’t matter. Your baby’s happiness, that didn’t matter.” What mattered was at Jennifer Granholm got the photo op, and that is who suffers in this philosophy. Regular, powerless, voiceless people are told, “You can’t have a stove, you can’t do that.” Babies, that’s who suffers. And Jennifer Granholm has yet to apologize to that mom and baby. And I think that’s very emblematic of the green movement writ large. They do not care who suffers in the process. The agenda is greater.
Beverly Hallberg:
People who are listening who are rightly concerned as you are, as I am, I know you have a five-part policy roadmap in your report, but what’s one thing that you think can happen, maybe that can be pushed through either Congress that gives us some hope that we can reverse some of these bad policies?
Daniel Turner:
I think the most important thing people can do is get involved at the localist level, especially if you’re in a red state. I have a theory that if you are in a red state and the left wants to do some damage, they know they’re not going to win the Governor’s mansion. They’re not going to win the Senate probably, maybe they’ve even written off the house candidates, but your local city council, that’s easy to pick off. How many times have you voted first, and not you Beverly, but just your audience, have you ever gone to your town mayors or you just forget about it? And of course you forget about it because there’s no flyers, there’s no TV ads, there’s no 19 people go up and vote, and you find out that bad operatives spent five grand and they flipped your city council.
And now your city council’s passing a rule that says, “By the year 2030, we will no longer sell gas stoves in Jefferson County.” And you scratch your head and you say, “How the hell did that happen?” That’s how it happened. Get involved at the most local area possible, your mayor, your city council, your county commissioners, they have a lot of power. And they’re usually the ones who are influenced by this huge outside money and pushing an agenda against the will of their people because they do it in secret. Best example, what a lot of your audience knows, look at the education system. Look at the way the moms stood up and were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you teaching my kid?” And then they were scratching, “How did this person get on the board?” That’s how they got on the board. And that’s what the enemies of freedom do writ large. Energies where I focus but boy, you could talk about education. You could talk about so many of these issues.
Beverly Hallberg:
And there’s so much more we could talk on this issue, but I want to remind people again, they can go to powerthefuture.org to see this report is called, Where Green Meets Red. I encourage you to check it out. But Daniel Turner with Power The Future, always a pleasure to have you on She Thinks.
Daniel Turner:
Thank you so much, Beverly. Sorry if I’m a little long-winded. I get excited.
Beverly Hallberg:
It’s great. And thank you all for watching us. Before you go, I want to let you know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you, so an investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. Please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate. That’s iwf.org/donate. Last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review, it does help. And we love it if you shared this episode so your friends can know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at IWF, thanks for watching.
