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Daily Caller

Tim Walz And The Hidden Story Of Twin Metals

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mandy Gunasekara

 

The media is now working overtime to rewrite the background of the Harris-Walz ticket. With all eyes shifting to Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, they have their work cut out.

Get ready for a new, refined version of Walz, where he is cast as a moderate, pro-worker Midwesterner — meant to balance out Kamala’s left-wing liberalism. But Walz is not that and American steelworkers, their families and the communities surrounding the Twin Metals Mine of Northeast Minnesota know this all too well.

Northeastern Minnesota is blessed with a plethora of critical and strategic metals that are key components to our modern life. There is an area referred to as the Duluth Complex that, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, is home to the largest undeveloped deposits of nickel, cobalt and platinum group minerals (PGM) in the world.

The Twin Metals mine in particular is positioned to be a state-of-the-art underground operation within the Duluth Complex using advanced and precise methods of extraction that could deliver these much-needed metals to growing markets.

Given that these metals are key components to cell phones and cars — both gas-powered and electric — as well as solar panels and windmills, the location of these minerals here in the United States should be good news. This should especially be true for an administration like Biden-Harris that is hell-bent on restructuring our entire utility and vehicle industries, so they are more “green.”

From a practical perspective, this type of restructuring will require an immense amount of the minerals that are located at, and very accessible in, the Twin Metals mine. Globally, one estimate suggests that to reach electrification goals the world will need to produce the same amount of copper in the next 25 years as humanity has produced in the last 5,000.

Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration not only cancelled two long-standing mineral leases at the Twin Metals mine, but they also imposed a 20-year moratorium on the surrounding area. This decision imperiled the 750 direct jobs and 1,500 spinoff jobs in the surrounding community that the mine would have supported.

Many of these jobs were for United Steelworkers who were set to buildout and operate the $1.7 billion mine. As often as the Biden-Harris administration talked about creating green energy jobs, they took numerous actions that cancelled the ones that actually did exist.

Walz oversaw the entire debacle. And when the Twin Metals mine and local jobs organizations asked for a lifeline in the aftermath of the Biden-Harris cancellation, he answered it with … more process! Specifically, Walz’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) allowed the mine to explore surrounding state and private lands for minerals but reiterated there would be no actual mining, and such a decision would likely be years into the future after “lengthy environmental review and permitting.”

In other, non-bureaucratic words: It’s paralysis by analysis for the project.

These cancelled mining projects and jobs would have been done consistent with U.S. safety and environmental standards. Instead, China will reap the benefits of the Biden-Harris cancellation and Walz’s complacency.

Beyond concern for negative environmental impacts, some reports have found that foreign sourced minerals are mined using child forced labor. From a national security purview, this anti-development approach is equally damaging as U.S. reliance on foreign-sourced minerals continues to grow. Specifically, for the minerals buried in abundance at the Twin Metals mine, the U.S. is over 50% import reliant for nickel, 79% reliant for platinum, 76% reliant for cobalt, and 37% reliant for copper.

Those who have seen Walz work up close, including Republican Rep. Pete Stauber, have sounded the alarm on the consequences of his anti-mining, anti-energy policies. Under his watch Minnesota electricity costs have skyrocketed for residents.

For businesses, it’s even worse. Minnesota now boasts the highest industrial electricity prices in the Midwest.

Walz’s folksy appearance aside, he has embraced California-style climate zealotry to the extreme. He signed his state up for “100 percent carbon free electricity by 2040” which is estimated to cost billions of dollars, double electricity prices by 2034, lead to blackouts and kill jobs.

He also wants to ban gas-powered vehicles in the process.

Walz’s aggressive, anti-development approach, especially on energy and the environment, mirrors that of failing socialist nations. It is no wonder Minnesota has experienced significant downfalls under his leadership.

Regardless of how the media portrays him, they cannot erase his record of selling out the workers of Twin Metals mine to the liberal Left.

Mandy Gunasekara served as chief of staff to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)

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Automotive

Biden-Harris Admin’s EV Coercion Campaign Hasn’t Really Gone All That Well

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By David Blackmon

The future direction of federal energy policy related to the transportation sector is a key question that will be determined in one way or another by the outcome of the presidential election. What remains unclear is the extent of change that a Trump presidency would bring.

Given that Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is a major supporter of former President Donald Trump, it seems unlikely a Trump White House would move to try to end the EV subsidies and tax breaks included in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those provisions, of course, constitute the “carrot” end of the Biden-Harris carrot-and-stick suite of policies designed to promote the expansion of EVs in the U.S. market.

The “stick” side of that approach comes in the form of stricter tailpipe emissions rules and higher fleet auto-mileage requirements imposed on domestic carmakers. While a Harris administration would likely seek to impose even more federal pressure through such command-and-control regulatory measures, a Trump administration would likely be more inclined to ease them.

But doing that is difficult and time-consuming and much would depend on the political will of those Trump appoints to lead the relevant agencies and departments.

Those and other coercive EV-related policies imposed during the Biden-Harris years have been designed to move the U.S. auto industry directionally to meet the administration’s stated goal of having EVs make up a third of the U.S. light duty fleet by 2030. The suite of policies does not constitute a hard mandate per se but is designed to produce a similar pre-conceived outcome.

It is the sort of heavy-handed federal effort to control markets that Trump has spoken out against throughout his first term in office and his pursuit of a second term.

A new report released this week by big energy data and analytics firm Enverus seems likely to influence prospective Trump officials to take a more favorable view of the potential for EVs to grow as a part of the domestic transportation fleet. Perhaps the most surprising bit of news in the study, conducted by Enverus subsidiary Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), is a projection that EVs are poised to be lower-priced than their equivalent gas-powered models as soon as next year, due to falling battery costs.

“Battery costs have fallen rapidly, with 2024 cell costs dipping below $100/kWh. We predict from [2025] forward EVs will be more affordable than their traditional, internal combustible engine counterparts,” Carson Kearl, analyst at EIR, says in the release. Kearl further says that EIR expects the number of EVs on the road in the US to “exceed 40 million (20%) by 2035 and 80 million (40%) by 2040.”

The falling battery costs have been driven by a collapse in lithium prices. Somewhat ironically, that price collapse has in turn been driven by the failure of EV expansion to meet the unrealistic goal-setting mainly by western governments, including the United States. Those same cause-and-effect dynamics would most likely mean that prices for lithium, batteries and EVs would rise again if the rapid market penetration projected by EIR were to come to fruition.

In the U.S. market, the one and only certainty of all of this is that something is going to have to change, and soon. On Monday, Ford Motor Company reported it lost another $1.2 billion in its Ford Model e EV division in the 3rd quarter, bringing its accumulated loss for the first 9 months of 2024 to $3.7 billion.

Energy analyst and writer Robert Bryce points out in his Substack newsletter that that Model e loss is equivalent to the $3.7 billion profit Ford has reported this year in its Ford Blue division, which makes the company’s light duty internal combustion cars and trucks.

While Tesla is doing fine, with recovering profits and a rising stock price amid the successful launch of its CyberTruck and other new products, other pure-play EV makers in the United States are struggling to survive. Ford’s integrated peers GM and Stellantis have also struggled with the transition to more EV model-heavy fleets.

None of this is sustainable, and a recalibration of policy is in order. Next Tuesday’s election will determine which path the redirection of policy takes.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

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Daily Caller

Trump Reportedly Told Netanyahu Israel Needs To Finish Gaza War By Time He Takes Office

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

By Adam Pack

Former President Donald Trump reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he wins a second term Israel’s war in Gaza needs to be finished by the time he takes office in January, The Times of Israel (TOI) reported.

Israel went to war with Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing conflict has left the terrorist group crippled and swaths of the Gaza enclave in ruins. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Israel’s efforts to wipe out Hamas, but has expressed that he wants the war to end in short order, telling Netanyahu in July that it needs to be over by the start of 2025, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told TOI.

The message was relayed to Netanyahu during the prime minister’s visit to Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, the sources told TOI. While Netanyahu’s trip to Mar-a-Lago was widely reported on at the time, this is the first occasion it has been reported that Trump said this during the visit.

 

Trump didn’t go into specifics with Netanyahu about his request, so it’s possible he would support “residual” Israeli military activity in Gaza, a former U.S. official told TOI. Trump also wants Israel to secure the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza — some of which are American citizens — before he takes office in January.

Relations between Trump and Netanyahu were icy after Trump lost the 2020 election. Netanyahu congratulated President Joe Biden following that election in a video message, angering Trump. Trump also felt at the time Netanyahu wasn’t serious about resolving tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

But the two have seemingly mended relations this year. They have spoken on several occasions since Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago in July. Netanyahu has said that Trump had called him two days in a row recently.

However, Trump has said on multiple occasions that Israel’s war in Gaza needs to end quickly because it has devasted the enclave and the Palestinian population living there, raising concerns among Israeli officials, two Israeli officials told TOI earlier this month. While Israel’s military operations in Gaza have largely ended, the government doesn’t yet seem comfortable with withdrawing entirely — especially given concerns that Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, widely seen as a corrupt governing body, will fill the power vacuum.

Despite Trump’s wishes, there are some hardliners in Netanyahu’s orbit who have threatened to oust the prime minister from power if he ends the war.

“A fight with Trump is something he hasn’t really had to deal with, and I think it’s something he’d want to avoid, but [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir may not let him,” a Knesset member told TOI.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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